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Providing software solutions since 1976
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Storage Vendors need to cater for SMBsJohannesburg, South Africa (01 Aug. 2009) – Opinions in the storage market are contentious at best. Where one half of the players in this space see enterprises' growing appetite for storage as a challenge for vendors to overcome with better hardware, the other half of the market believes the solution lies with software that slows the alarming growth in storage demand. And in all of this, few companies even give the SMB a second glance. "Ironically, however, the SMB market will be a huge contributor to the growth of the world's storage over the next few years," says Jacques Klopper, IBM product manager at Tarsus Technologies. Klopper says that there's already strong evidence of this if one considers the number of SMBs that are making the move to dedicated networkable storage solutions, instead of conventional storage in the form of internal disks directly attached to a fileserver. "IBM's launch of the DS3000 has been a great success because it squarely addresses customers who are stuck between a fileserver that doesn't meet their performance and capacity requirements and a high-end storage solution that costs much more than they can justify," he says. "Besides its ability to scale up from a single unit populated with two to three 250Gb drives to a four-unit system, each with 12 fully-populated drive bays (making for a total capacity in the 40Tb range), the DS3000 differentiates itself from its peers through its ability to offer customers a mix of SATA and SAS interfaces," Klopper explains. "This means that a single unit can be used for both high-performance storage, if some of the drives used are based on the faster SAS interface, and more cost-effective pursuits if some of the drives used are based on the SATA interface," he says. Klopper says that any analyst polled on the topic will agree that storage volumes and demands will continue to skyrocket over the coming years. "It stands to reason then that vendors will need to rise to the occasion and begin addressing the lower end of the market since today's smaller players could well end up being tomorrow's large enterprises," he says.
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