Small companies, big business for storage resellers

Good governance requirements have placed the spotlight on the need for improved record-keeping, an activity for which small businesses, in particular, are not well recognised.

Dion Gerrans, storage brand manager for Africa at Computer Associates (CA), looks at how resellers can assist smaller companies to optimise data storage and retrieval solutions that map directly to their unique business needs.

The need for data storage repositories and appropriate management strategies is no longer exclusive to larger organisations. Today, with increasing emphasis on comprehensive record-keeping designed to achieve good governance goals, the need in even the smallest of companies for a comprehensive data storage plan has been exposed.

This is underscored by a report prepared by the New York-based market research company, Access Markets International (AMI), which predicts a significant rise in spending by smaller companies on data storage solutions.

The report forecasts a "phenomenal growth" in spending over the next three years by small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), more than quadrupling current worldwide benchmarks to $18.5 billion per annum by 2006.

According to the AMI report, SME storage spending will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 43% over this period, eclipsing the 5% rate in large-enterprise storage spending.

However, the report has a word of caution for storage resellers, saying that companies that do well selling complex solutions to large enterprises often fail to relate to the unique needs of the smaller company and "struggle to successfully navigate the highly fragmented SMB market".

There is no doubt that, with the economic constraints of the past two years to deal with, smaller organisations, in particular, are having to do more with fewer resources.

In the data storage context, this has increasingly necessitated a shift from labour-intensive "reactive data storage management" to resource conserving, "proactive management" methods.

However, the uninterrupted data needs of 24x7x365 e-businesses have added a new dimension to this scenario, fundamentally changing the availability and performance requirements of storage solutions.

This has resulted in downtime traditionally allotted to data management and backup activities shrinking to zero - in many cases.

Storage solutions must now be able to transparently manage and protect data without interrupting the application; they must have policy-based recovery capabilities so they restore the most critical business process first; and they must provide topology discovery, virtualisation and active monitoring of all storage components.

Moreover, storage solutions of tomorrow must provide data organisational functions such as file system management, file sharing, volume management, data replication and dynamic storage allocation - as well application and server fail-over, without clustering, to ensure high availability.

The good news for the storage market is that SMEs have a positive outlook towards new storage technology. A recent survey conducted by a leading channel publication in the US revealed that, increasingly, SMEs are relying on technology as a way to gain competitive advantage or differentiate their businesses in the marketplace.

Many SMEs see the adoption of technology - including storage solutions - as a means to boost productivity and efficiency.

These solutions, coupled with the continuing emergence of standards, the Linux operating system, and improved interoperability which is fuelling advancements in storage area networking (SAN) technologies, promise even more benefits for the SME market.

However, very few SMEs are capable of implementing new technology solutions without the assistance of appropriately skilled resellers.

The SAN, for example, is the highest form of art in the world of enterprise storage when compared to other options of direct-attached (DAS) and network-attached storage (NAS).

It is agreed that a SAN is more difficult to implement than a DAS or NAS solution, and that is due in part to the skills component required for the former, for which SME firms are largely unprepared.

The same is true of new-generation solutions such as Internet Protocol SANs (IP SANs) that allow SMEs to break free of the limits of direct-attached storage. An IP SAN is much cheaper to maintain than (say) a Fibre Channel SAN, because Ethernet is already in place in 90% of businesses today, but requires the expertise of an appropriately skilled reseller to implement.

While networks large and small can enjoy the benefits of new technology solutions, there is a need to pay careful attention to the security and other operational risks that accompany them.

This is where resellers can play an important role. Just as there are distinct segments of the SME market (based on individual IT needs), there are also clear segments associated with the IT reseller/consultant community - each with its own level of IT sophistication.

The higher-competency resellers, for instance, are more likely to be supporting SMEs with advanced IT solutions in place - that is, those that may be good candidates for SANs or IP SANs.

Therefore it is important for SMEs to identify appropriate partners in their quest to improve and enhance their investments in storage.

At the other end of the scale, it is also important for technology vendors to be able to identify and target the appropriate channel partners as part of their strategy to sell technology solutions into SMEs.