Falling storage prices and rising storage capacities are doing well in keeping pace with the ever-increasing storage demands imposed by regulations like HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley.
A new generation of products are being introduced that target SMBs (Small and Medium Business) that have huge storage capacities and include enterprise-level features like RAID and hot-swappability. Basically, these products come with enterprise capabilities, but not at enterprise prices. RAID technology employs multiple low-cost disk drives to achieve data redundancy/integreity, fault-tolerance and better capacity. Hot Swapping allows drives to be removed and replaced without having to power down the system.
The Yankee Group in their 2006 Small and Medium Business Storage Survey found that expenditures in the SMB market for storage has increased in all segments. In 2005, SMB Storage Management Software Spending was $2.8 billion, Storare Hardware was $7.1 billion and Storage Services was $3.6 billion. The Yankee Group is forecasting 14% growth in SMB storage spending in 2006.
Greg Schultz at SearchSMB.com compared what is happening to storage devices to the shift that occured from mainframes to UNIX/Linux and Windows servers. Large capacity storage devices are becoming much more affordable and they are easier to install, manage and upgrade. All good news to SMB customers.
One example of this new generation of products is the Intel’s SS4000-E. For about $2000 this device can be configured with four 500-Gbyte NAS (Network Attached Storage) hard drives. Another example is MicroNet’s PlatinumNAS 3.0 which can be configured with four 750-GByte drives for about $3000. Terrabytes of data for very reasonable prices.
Other examples of high-capacity, reliable and affordable storage products being targeted at SBMs are Hewlett-Packard’s All-In-One Storage Systems, IBM’s System Storage N7000, and Compellent’s Storage Center.
The affordability and high capacity of these new products will make many SMBs look at them to assist with email archiving, remote office storage, disk-based backup and virtual tape.
