Australian SMBs are hungry for storage, yet have been left underserved by major storage vendors. However, increasing demand for digital marketing and fast access to information is causing vendors to take notice of this once-neglected sector.
According to a 2006 survey by Gartner on the major storage concerns faced by SMBs, the top issue was storage capacity, being driven mostly by e-mail and document retention, databases and ERP systems. While these traditional storage-gobblers still put pressure on resources, digital marketing is feeding the demand for storage and causing vendors to take notice of the "underserved" SMB, according to Gartner's managing VP of storage, Phil Sargeant.
"Three years ago, an SMB would have thought one terabyte is huge. But today SMBs don't see two terabytes as much at all," Sargeant told ZDNet Australia.
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Besides the usual storage demands, many of today's SMBs relate to customers using the Web and so increasingly need to store digital photography and video content.
One business affected by this trend is Australian online trading company and eBay competitor, Swapace.com. CEO and managing director, Joseph Renzi, said the company's 200,000 members are driving the company's storage demands for its production servers.
"People expect to be able to upload images for free, but it costs us money. Some businesses like eBay allow their customers to upload something like two images for free, but we allow our customers to do more because we're trying to compete on price," Renzi told ZDNet Australia.
"So most of the data we store is images and, for performance reasons, we store them in different sizes -- thumbnails, medium and large images -- as separate files. All this adds up," he said.
The other major demand on storage for Swapace.com's internal servers is e-mail and attachments. Renzi said the company doesn't restrict mailboxes in the way a large organisation might because doing so constrains staff performance and knowledge.
"We do struggle with mail files getting bigger. There are huge attachments in all these files. The company I used to work for -- one of the top 50 large businesses in Australia -- would restrict the size of your mailbox, but we don't do that here because it made it hard for me to do my job properly. You couldn't receive new mail until you deleted your old mail," he said.
Gartner's Sargeant agrees, adding that SMBs increasingly want faster access to their information, which in turn is driving the adoption of disk-based storage at the SMB level where tape was previously used.
"Before they could put that [information] off to tape but now they want access to it all the time, so they need it on disk," said Sargeant.
This requirement is driving the adoption of technologies such as virtual tape libraries and has given rise to multi-tiered storage practices, commonly referred to as disk to disk to tape (D2D2T), now trickling into the SMB sector.
One reason why SMBs have been underserved is that the sector is so broadly defined: Gartner's storage survey included businesses with between 100 and 2,000 employees. The consequence of such broad requirements is that vendors have aimed either at entry level users or high end users, resulting in a lack of scalability, according to Dell.
"A lot of SMBs were being underserved in the storage environment. They had a choice of high performance at a high price or low performance at a super low price. So, part of the plans around [Dell's iSCSI protocol SAN] the MD3000i, was to bring greater functionality to an iSCSI device," a Dell storage spokesperson told ZDNet Australia.
iSCSI has been touted as the way forward for SANs, particularly at the SMB level, which lack the capital to implement fibre channel networks. There has been some resistance to the technology, partly because one gigabit speed available across such networks is too slow, however analysts expect iSCSI SANs to become more popular when four or 10 gigabit Ethernet becomes available.
Nonetheless, Dell, which paid US$1.4 billion for iSCSI SAN specialists EqualLogic last year, is hedging its bets on the future dominance of iSCSI protocol networked storage, which is expected to drive down the cost of implementing SANs, particularly at the SMB level, since they can use existing network infrastructure.
While storage platforms such as Dell's PowerVault MD3000i, NetApp's StoreVault and HP's All-in-One serve SMBs with entry level storage demands quite well, the only storage system that has been designed to meet the full spectrum of SMB needs is EMC's recently announced Clariion AX4 -- with a starting capacity of 750GB that scales to 60 terabytes -- which can cater for a rapidly expanding SMB, according to Gartner's Sargeant.
"These storage platforms are directed at SMBs but wouldn't be able to address the same spectrum [as EMC's Clariion AX4] because they will run out of capacity. Therefore if those users that entered into say StoreVault grew significantly, they would have to make a product change," said Sargeant.
The one thing that all these storage systems do address however is the lack of specialised IT knowledge within many SMB organisations and branch offices of larger organisations. Whilst Australia continues its protracted battle against skill shortages in IT, management of storage and backup requirements will continue to pose a problem for SMBs.
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