Spending on network attached storage (NAS) will continue to grow through 2015, driven by a major shift in storage deployments towards IP-connected systems.
This is according to IDC research, which also forecasts that, by 2017, there could be nearly 13 million NAS systems in use, a large portion of which will be one- to five-bay small office, home office (SOHO) systems.
In an interview with ITWeb, Kalvin Subbadu, WD components sales manager for SA, noted that, in the coming years, the demand for compact NAS systems that offer all the features of their larger counterparts is expected to scale up significantly in the SOHO space.
"In fact, IDC's Personal and Entry Level Storage Device Forecast reports that the number of 2.5-inch NAS devices will more than double from their current levels in the next two years," he said. "Today, there are many SOHO-aimed NAS devices on the market and if you are a power user or just have hefty storage needs, you can choose from one of the growing number of unpopulated NAS enclosures."
Subbadu adds that these SOHO-aimed devices are generally designed with up to five-drive bays and, as such, after purchasing one of these units, users will need to populate them with hard drives.
WD recently added a 4TB, 3.5-inch hard drive and a 2.5-inch form factor hard drive to its WD Red NAS product offering, in response to the trend towards higher hard drive capacities.
According to Subbadu, the need for higher capacities is in direct proportion to the exponential growth of digital content. "Our 4TB WD Red drive provides end-users with additional capacity; users of five-bay NAS enclosures will now be able to reach up to 20TB of storage capacity. Previously, the highest capacity WD Red NAS drive was 3TB, making 15TB the highest capacity in a five-bay NAS enclosure."
Channel benefits
For the channel, Subbadu believes resellers can tackle this market with drives that are specifically engineered for these environments. Subbadu points out that the channel can benefit from hard drives that are purpose-built for NAS environments.
"They will have the confidence in offering drives that work in different RAID environments at an attractive price point. In this scenario, giving the channel the right drive for the job will prevent end-users from opting for alternative, price-sensitive storage solutions that ultimately result in system issues, disk failure and, consequentially, more returns and more customer downtime for resellers."
He also reveals that WD has a number of channel loyalty benefits, including the MyWD Partner Programme, which offers resellers the opportunity to earn US dollars when buying WD internal drives from WD authorised distributors.
In addition, WD offers marketing support in the form of Market Development Funds to help its resellers build brand awareness and brand loyalty to WD as a whole.
WD regards product knowledge as one of the key drivers of sales, thus offering sales training to educate resellers and, in turn, offering the appropriate product to their end-users, he adds.
"If customers buy the right products, their experience of the brand will be enhanced, and their experience of the reseller will be a positive one. Further assisting the channel to 'skill up' on our products, our online training programme known as WD University provides distributors and resellers with a tool to enhance their skills and knowledge."
WD currently has three distributors: Drive Control Corporation, Pinnacle Africa and Sahara Computers, Subbadu notes, adding that there are no plans to increase the number of distributors as the company is satisfied with the exposure and sales they currently generate.
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