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Solving Storage for Your SMB

a Jupiter Online Media™ Storage eBook


From one angle, the contrast between enterprise storage requirements and those of small and medium-sized busi-nesses (SMBs) could hardly be greater. Enterprise IT demands capacity, scalability, flexibility, and performance,while the typical small business would trade a good part of these qualities for affordability and low maintenance.

But from the perspective of problems to solve, there's a lot of common ground. As in the enterprise, SMBs mustgrapple with data protection, archiving, security, and availability issues, all under the burden of rapidly growing data.

SMB storage poses a challenge, both to the SMB and to storage vendors. For the SMB, the challenge is to effec-tively apply technology invented for the enterprise, which often assumes nearly unlimited financial and IT staffingresources. For storage vendors that want a piece of this large and fast-growing market, the challenge is to build andpackage solutions with lower cost and simpler management, and to find a way to deliver these solutions to a broadarray of customers.

Let's start at the beginning. Many small businesses don't have experience with buying servers, which they will needto power more than just their storage needs.

How to Pick a Small Business ServerA longstanding complaint from many small and midsize businesses is that they receive scant attention from servervendors. Traditionally, their needs are an afterthought, and products "tailored" to their requirements in reality areoften "lite" versions of the enterprise-class models.

"It's a mistake to think SMBs are different - they are just smaller," says Steve Duplessie, an analyst at EnterpriseStrategy Group. "The SMB's data is just a valuable to them as Citibank's is to it."

To his mind, SMBs need things simpler than the big shops because they have limited expertise and are not in the ITbusiness. Yet even big shops, he notes, can benefit from simple.

John Nguyen, worldwide channel marketing manager at Tyan Computer, agrees that simplicity is important. He rec-ommends SMBs buy blades, if possible, as such systems have no internal storage. The organization can then buyan external array to meet its storage needs and network it to other servers to create an IP SAN (storage area net-work).

"iSCSI is great for the SMB because it's free and doesn't require special server hardware," says Nguyen.

Pradeep Parmar, a product line marketing manager within Sun's Systems Group, agrees with Nguyen and Duplessiebut adds several other important factors for SMBs to consider: performance, efficiency, flexibility, longevity, reliability,and maintenance.

"For the highest performance and the ability to scale the servers as your business grows, choose AMD Opteronprocessors," says Parmar. "You should also choose systems with low power consumption and heat output, as wellas those that can be upgraded easily and inexpensively."

Not surprisingly, he emphasizes the value of the Sun Fire X2100 Opteron-based model, which has a starting price of$745. This 1U, 2-way unit runs all major operating systems, including Solaris, Linux, and Windows, as well asVMware for virtualization. Solaris, Parmar says, is a great choice for business-critical applications on virtually anyserver, and it's available for free as an alternative to Linux.

HP strikes a similar chord when asked about the server selection criteria. Blades, in particular, receive heavy empha-sis. Krista Satterthwaite, group manager of industry standard server marketing at HP, touts the modular nature of HP

1 Solving Storage for Your SMB, A Jupiter Online Media IT Management eBook. © 2007, Jupitermedia Corp.


BladeSystem for SMBs, such as the ProLiant BL20p.BladeSystem features multiple components, including serv-er blades, storage, and networking within a shared infra-structure controlled by an integrated management system.For SMBs with in-house IT support, however, she recom-mends rack servers, such as the Proliant DL140.

"The HP ProLiant family includes a comprehensive portfolioof rack servers, storage, and management software tosimplify the setup and management of SMB IT environ-ments," says Satterthwaite. "This is effective in reducingcosts and improving employee productivity."

Big House AlternativesTyan's Nguyen stresses that SMBs don't have to buy fromone of the big vendors. He suggests three alternatives:They can build the server themselves, buy a bare boneswhitebox server and build up from that, or buy a configure-to-order (CTO) system from a supply/assembly house (i.e.,an outfit that builds entire systems based on customerspec).

For smaller companies, the first option may involve toomuch expertise. But purchasing bare bones white boxesrequires only the additional populating of processors,memory, and hard drives.

"Many times the barebones suppliers will have tested andqualified components for use with the barebones server sothat the customer will be able to get up and running in aminimum amount of time," says Nguyen. "But if the SMBcustomer is short on time and resources, a CTO systemwould be the most convenient, as it has everything includ-ed, installed, and ready to run right out of the box."

Tyan offers barebones servers to the channel, whichresellers then offer to retailers. Intel- and AMD-basedservers are available, ranging from 1U rackmount boxes tomini and full-size tower servers ready to be populated withprocessors, memory, and drives. A typical barebones 1UAMD rackmount server consists of a motherboard, powersupply, drive hot-swap backplane, four drive cages, a setof sliding rails, a set of mounting handles, two heatsinks forthe processors, and a set of ancillary items (such as CD,manual, cables, and screws). Tyan also offers motherboardplatforms for customers that want to build from scratch.

What to Avoid On the flip side of the coin, the various experts have plentyto say on what to avoid in server selection. Duplessiestresses the importance of a storage strategy, even forsmall businesses. To his mind, there is no point in buying



DAS: direct-attached storage. The term used to differenti-ate non-networked storage from SAN and NAS. In directattached storage, the hardware is connected to an individ-ual server. There may be more than one server but storagefor each server is managed separately and cannot beshared.

iSCSI: Pronounced eye skuzzy. Short for Internet SCSI, anIP-based standard for linking data storage devices over anetwork and transferring data by carrying SCSI commandsover IP networks. iSCSI supports a Gigabit Ethernet inter-face at the physical layer, which allows systems support-ing iSCSI interfaces to connect directly to standard GigabitEthernet switches and/or IP routers.

NAS: networked-attached storage. A server that is dedi-cated to nothing more than file sharing. NAS does not pro-vide any of the activities that a server in a server-centricsystem typically provides, such as e-mail, authenticationor file management. NAS allows more hard disk storagespace to be added to a network that already utilizesservers without shutting them down for maintenance andupgrades.

RAID: Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive)Disks, a category of disk drives that employ two or moredrives in combination for fault tolerance and performance.

SAN: a high-speed subnetwork of shared storage devices.A SAN's architecture works in a way that makes all stor-age devices available to all servers on a LAN or WAN. Asmore storage devices are added to a SAN, they too will beaccessible from any server in the larger network.

SATA: Serial ATA. A serial link that consists of a singlecable with a minimum of four wires that creates a point-to-point connection between devices. Transfer rates forSerial ATA begin at 150MBps. One of the main designadvantages of Serial ATA is that the thinner serial cablesfacilitate more efficient airflow inside a form factor andalso allow for smaller chassis designs.

Server blade: A single circuit board populated with compo-nents such as processors, memory, and network connec-tions that are usually found on multiple boards. Serverblades are designed to slide into existing servers. Serverblades are more cost-efficient, smaller, and consume lesspower than traditional box-based servers.

--www.webopedia.com

machines with internal storage unless the firm really believes it will never buy another system.

"If you are going to have two or more machines, make sure the storage is external," says Duplessie. "It will cost youa little more up front, but the serviceability and flexibility it will provide will far outweigh the incremental cost."

He also recommends close scrutiny of warranty service programs. All warrantees are marketed as though the serv-ice company will pop out and fix the problem in 10 minutes, but the fine print likely says something to the effect of,in practice the SMB will spend the day talking to someone on the other side of the world for hours, and then maybesomeone will show up in a few days. Thus, it is important to select a supplier with local service capabilities.

Nguyen, on the other hand, recommends giving more weight to ensuring the server meets specific applicationrequirements. A customer looking for high-performance servers, for example, wouldn't want to use a single-proces-sor embedded server, as it would be underpowered for the target applications. Like Duplessie, Nguyen feels stronglyabout service contract fine print.

"If the SMB customer can't find a clear definition of what kind of support and post-sales service is offered by theserver supplier or builder, it should look elsewhere," says Nguyen.

Understandably, HP is less enamored with the bare bones or the configure-to-order approaches. Satterthwaite rec-ommends SMBs avoid server solutions that increase the time they would need to spend performing routine mainte-nance, as this prevents admins from focusing on more pressing business problems. She also suggests SMBs steerclear of server vendors that don't provide manageability to better contain complexity and IT sprawl.

Not Different, Just Smaller In the end, each SMB must decide for itself which vendor best caters to its needs - based squarely on the valueand applicability of the products provided. After all, the SMB market is probably the most misunderstood segmentout there, as its requirements are as varied as its constituents.

For one thing, the term SMB has no single, standard definition. Some describe a small business as having 20 orless employees, whereas others define it as less than 500 or less than 1,000 employees. Still others define it by rev-enue.

Thus, a highly hyped SMB server could actually be overkill in some shops. "The SMB doesn't care about speedsand feeds - they want stuff to run their applications and just work," says Duplessie. "They want it simple, and theydon't want to have to do a secondary public offering just to buy servers and storage."

He makes the point that small companies don't want to hire IT gurus to run their data center. All they want is to plugstuff in, add to it when necessary and have it just run.

But such basic requirements are seldom understood, in part because of incorrect vendor perception, and also inpart to the way products are designed.

"If the vendor community was really smart, they would design every product for the SMB, and then move them upmarket instead of the other way around," concludes Duplessie.

Small Business Means Big Storage ChallengesExpansion into SMB territory reflects the opportunity seen by large storage vendors in a market where increasingrequirements have trumped simpler technologies. But it is also a matter of basic economics. "EMC has enjoyed anenviable record of growth, year after year," says Larry Zulch, vice president and general manager of EMC's InsigniaSMB program. "Maintaining that level of growth requires moving into adjacent markets."



NAS Tops SANs in SMB SpaceThe first step toward solving storage problems is consolidation. Most SMBs appear to have taken that first step, atleast as far as turning from isolated servers with direct-attached storage (DAS) to network attached storage (NAS).A Yankee Group survey found that 56 percent of companies with 250 to 499 employees deployed NAS storage. Thenumbers are slightly lower for smaller companies, but even for companies with fewer than 100 employees, NAS stillhad more than 40 percent penetration.

The same survey found that SAN has less traction among smaller companies. Yankee Group found that 20 percentof companies in the 250 to 499 range made use of IP SANs, and only 13 percent of these companies ran FibreChannel SANs.

The greater complexity of SAN and the availability of very low-cost NAS appear to make NAS the current deploy-ment of choice among SMBs.

"NAS has really proliferated," says Gary Chen, small and medium business strategies analyst for Yankee Group.Chen cautions that for the smallest companies, NAS storage may mean little more than a single disk in a box withan Ethernet connection. "NAS can be a very low-end product now," says Chen. "A lot of NAS in [the smallest com-panies] is going to be retail, consumer stuff."

Different Needs for Different BusinessOne difficulty in trying to describe the SMB storage picture is the broad inclusiveness of the SMB label, coveringcompanies of widely varying size and IT sophistication. EMC says its Insignia line is designed to reach companiesfrom 20 to 200 employees; Hitachi Data Systems targets SMB customers in the 100- to 400-employee range.Although some of these businesses may make use of high-end storage technology, many may be just beginning toaddress basic requirements.

"Backup is still the main issue with storage for SMBs," says Chen. "That affects the majority of SMBs." Many, hesays, "don't have any backup at all, or the backup is not robust enough."

Karen Sigman, vice president of worldwide channels for Hitachi Data Systems, sees a similar picture. "The first prob-lems are archive and consolidation," says Sigman. "They're still a long way from addressing those problems in thisspace."

However, Sigman also points out that data availability is a growing concern for smaller companies that have becomeincreasingly aware of the critical need for uninterrupted access to company data.

Breece Hill is a storage company that targets SMB customers. Pat Blakey, Breece Hill's director of marketing, seesdevelopments beyond the initial phase of reliable backups.

"Before, it was just simple backup and recovery," says Blakey. "Now they're looking at it from a standpoint of, 'Howcan we manage data based on the time value of it?'"

Tony Lock, chief analyst at Bloor Research, doesn't necessarily see a direct correlation between company size andstorage sophistication. "There are some very small organizations that are beginning to use network storage moreeffectively, beginning to use storage virtualization very effectively, and some of the more sophisticated software man-agement tools," says Lock.

Regulatory compliance is often cited as a driver for archiving at the enterprise level, but compliance appears to havea more moderate affect on smaller organizations. This may be because smaller companies are more likely to be pri-vately held, and, outside of certain industries, privately held companies are subject to fewer regulations.



Sigman says there is growing recognition of compliance issues among SMBs, noting that compliance has madeSMBs "more rigorous" in their approach to data retention.

Making Storage Fit the SMBFor the vast majority of SMBs, lacking storage specialists, easier deployment, and lower ongoing maintenance arecritical concerns. Making solutions more accessible to these organizations often revolves around packaging togetherdifferent pieces to reduce on-site involvement.

"It's all about packaging it for this market space," says Sigman. "It's taking all the elements that typically are cus-tomized and put together by highly trained engineers and putting it in a simple box with simple instructions just likeyou would have with a PC."

"At the enterprise level, they can buy several boxes and make it work," says Blakey. Breece Hill sells a D2D2T (diskto disk to tape) appliance that sidesteps the need to make multiple products work together. Stone points out that asingle warranty and a single service contract are other advantages to an appliance approach.

EMC's Insignia line represents a different sort of packaging, a packaging of the company's SMB storage offeringsinto a limited portfolio with relatively few items. Customers can choose from among a few SMB-focused configura-tions, rather than wading through all of the company's hardware and software storage offerings and the myriad ofways they can be put together. This is an important development, says Chen.

"A lot of it is making it easy for SMBs to understand what all of the pieces do," says Chen. Chen goes further, say-ing EMC's approach with Insignia "demonstrates what storage has to be for the SMB market."

Zulch says his company's approach is one of tailoring solutions for the SMB market. "We can't just take enterpriseproducts, dumb 'em down, and be successful," says Zulch. "They have to be easy to use and to install, but theyalso have to be highly capable."

Ironically, according to Zulch, making complicated storage products easy to use requires more, not less, advanceddesign. "SMB requires the most sophisticated products in the portfolio," he says.

The Big NamesBoth EMC and HDS have made significant moves in the SMB market. EMC rolled out Insignia, and HDS introducedplug-and-play SAN kits compatible with Microsoft's Simple SAN initiative. IBM, HP, Network Appliance, EMC, andHDS are five big-name storage vendors actively courting the SMB market.

Lock sees these developments as part of an increasingly effective approach to SMBs by enterprise storage vendors."The large storage vendors have begun to take the market sector very seriously indeed," says Lock, "and havebegun to tailor their solutions to fit the market. Until recently, they haven't really had suitable offerings."

The bigger challenge may be in reaching SMB customers; the sheer number and diversity of SMBs makes a directsales approach impossible. Worth noting, both EMC and HDS made channel-related announcements as part of theirSMB product unveilings.

"You can't reach this market without channel, that's the fact that most of these organizations find hardest to dealwith," says Lock. Lock notes that the development of a distribution channel and SMB marketing on the part of thelarge storage vendors is "evolving."

"And by evolving," he adds, "I mean in the true Darwinian sense of the word, that they're trying lots of differentthings, some of which work, and a lot of which don't."



Sigman acknowledges that SMB and enterprise segments require different approaches. "It's really easy to make themistake of trying to apply your enterprise processes to this market." The difference, she says, is that "there's a lotmore custom in the upper-end space than in the lower-end space. You've got to package it better, you've got tosimplify the user experience."

Other big-name IT vendors also have their sights set on the SMB market. There's Dell, of course, long familiar toSMB hardware customers and a longtime EMC partner. Then there's Microsoft, which has rolled more and morestorage capability into its Windows Server 2003 operating system, effectively bringing some high-end storage capa-bilities into the mainstream. Microsoft's participation "brings storage to the attention of the SMB in a way that theother vendors hadn't previously had success," says Lock.

It's clear that vendors have gotten better at addressing the requirements of SMB customers, and that SMB cus-tomers have grown more sophisticated in their use of storage technology. What's needed to progress into moreadvanced technologies, such as virtual tape (VTL) and encryption, says Lock, is a more educated SMB market."These are areas where the market as a whole really needs to learn what it should do, and then get hold of somebest practices on how to do it," he says. "That's where the storage vendors should really be trying to help their cus-tomers."

'Storage Server' DefinedWhen is a server not a server?

When it's a Storage Server.Ask people what a storage server is, and you can expect to hear a variety of answers. Some will say it is a regularserver with added features, a few describe it as a stripped-down box dedicated to a specialized function, and stillothers believe the term refers only to a network attached storage (NAS) box.

Let's attempt to define a storage server, differentiate it from a regular server, and give examples of storage serverson the market.

Not Your Average ServerThe typical server is configured to perform multiple functions. It operates as a file, print, application database, Web,or miscellaneous server. As such, it must have fast chips, more RAM, and plenty of internal disk space to cope withwhatever people decide to do with it.

A storage server is designed for a specific purpose, and thus is configured differently. It may come with a little extrastorage or a great deal. "A general-purpose server typically has five or fewer disks inside," says Graham Lovell, sen-ior director x64 servers at Sun Microsystems. "A storage server, on the other hand, has at least six, and more, usu-ally 12 to 24 disks."

Storage servers are normally individual units. Sometimes they are built into a 4U rackmount. Alternatively, they canconsist of two boxes - a storage unit and a server located near by. Both boxes can then be placed side-by-side in arack. The Sun StorEdge 3120 storage unit and SunFire X4100 server, for example, can be combined into a storageserver and placed in a rack.

Apart from extra disks, what else is different about storage servers? In many cases, they come with a host of spe-cialized services. This can include storage management software, extra hardware for higher resilience, a range ofRAID configurations and extra network connections so that more desktops can be connected to it.

Just a NAS Box?Interestingly, some vendors define storage servers purely in terms of NAS. A NAS appliance (also known as a NASfiler) generally has a slimmed-down operating system OS and file system, and only processes input/output (I/O)



1. Dual-Core is a new technology designed to improve performance of multithreaded software products and hardware-aware multitasking operating systems and may require appropriate operating system software for full benefit; check with software provider to determine suitability; not all customers or software applications will necessarily benefit from use of this technology. Intel’s numbering is not a measurement of higher performance. Intel, Intel logo, Intel Inside, Intel Inside logo and Intel Xeon are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and other countries. L.P. Microsoft and Windows are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. ©2007 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice.

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requests by the main file sharing protocols. The big advantage of the NAS architecture is that it enables storage tobe rapidly added by plugging the appliance into a network hub or switch.

"As far as HP is concerned, a storage server is NAS," says Jim Hankins, product marketing manager for HP's NASdivision. "In essence, it is a dedicated file and print server."

HP has five ProLiant models available as general-purpose servers or storage servers/NAS filer - each has the samebasic hardware configuration. If licensed as a storage server, the user may not run general-purpose applications onthat server. If the same ProLiant server is being used as a regular server, however, applications can be run on it. Tosweeten the deal, HP prices its storage servers a little lower than their general-purpose siblings.

In addition, HP's NAS-based storage servers have extra functionality built into the operating system - storage-spe-cific management tools, "quota-ing" features, storage reporting capabilities, and a Web-based user interface thatmakes it easier to configure file and print. These features are not available on its general-purpose servers.

"For a little bit less, you get a lot more value add," says Hankins.

So is NAS really just a storage server? The answer varies, depending on whom you ask. But it appears there is verylittle difference between them. NAS, it turns out, isn't really storage networking. Actual network-attached storagewould be storage attached to a SAN. NAS, on the other hand, is just a specialized server attached to a local-areanetwork. All it does is make its files available to users and applications connected to that NAS box - much the sameas a storage server.

"NAS is a marketing term," says Dan Tanner, an analyst at storage consulting firm ProgresSmart. "NAS is really noth-ing more than a file server, but specialized or adapted to the single purpose of serving files."

And what a marketing campaign it has been. From nowhere in the mid-1990s, Gartner projections predict the NASmarket will exceed $2 billion by 2008, with an annual growth rate of 9 percent.

What's MissingEnterprise Strategy Group's Duplessie defines a storage server as an optimized appliance designed to feed informa-tion, via a network, to a person or an application. As such, it doesn't typically handle computation-heavy tasks, butit has been designed from the ground up to provide specific input/output (I/O) capabilities along with data protectioncapabilities.

"A regular server has to be generic, it doesn't know what kind of load demands it will have - gaming is much differ-ent than running a database, for example. A storage server, such as a NAS box, is a contained appliance that doesone thing really well, like file serving.

What does a "regular" server have that a storage server doesn't? According to Duplessie, it typically has more pro-cessing power, more RAM, and a more generic I/O structure and file system. As a result, most storage servers per-form at 50 percent of the performance of a regular server for the same function, he says.

This trend toward specialized computing elements is far from new. TCP/IP routing, for example, was a function thatevery operating system ran - until Cisco came out with a dedicated box that did it far better than hosting it on ageneral-purpose server.

"Any time you can optimize a function, it will be better [on a specialized box] than if executed on general-purposegear," says Duplessie.

Dan Tanner, an analyst with the storage-consulting firm ProgresSmart, agrees with Duplessie's view that a storageserver is a specialized server or appliance.



"The server operating system is cut down to address purely print server or file server functions, and often containsspecially tuned or enhanced code," says Tanner. "Before NAS came along, though, Microsoft said you could use aregular server for file serving."

But using a vanilla server for file serving could lead to problems. Administering a general-purpose server is morecomplex. Further, someone might be tempted to use the server for multiple functions. Dedicated storage servers,therefore, have become the norm.

Not surprisingly, Microsoft introduced Windows Storage Server 2003 to distinguish it from general servers runningthe Windows 200x operating system. Windows Storage Server 2003 is a dedicated file and print server based onWindows Server 2003 and tailored to networked storage. It supports file serving and backup and replication ofstored data. It can also be used to consolidate multiple file servers into a single box.

Windows Storage Server 2003 includes advanced availability features, such as point-in-time data copies, replication,and server clustering. They come in sizes ranging from a few hundred gigabytes to several terabytes. It is available inpre-configured NAS appliances from vendors such as HP and Dell. As a result, IDC reports NAS appliances runningWindows now account for about half of all appliances in the market.

Storage Servers vs. Disk ArraysJust as there is some confusion between ordinary servers and storage servers, there is also sometimes a misunder-standing between storage servers and disk arrays. While not applicable to many small businesses, disk arrays canbe very useful for SMBs within certain industries - notably medical, multimedia creation, and financial - that generatetremendous amounts of data that must be stored, managed, and archived.

A storage server can have as many as 24 disks - enough to qualify as an array. Disk arrays, however, can have hun-dreds of disks. "A storage server is usually stand-alone and not connected to other servers," says Lovell. "Multipleservers, however, typically connect to a disk array."

Disk arrays, too, often connect to a server that could be styled a storage server. The storage server is the intelli-gence that goes in front of the array. In this arrangement, the server can manage several tiers of storage. It can evenarrange the replication of data from one tier to another.

"A storage server serves the storage, and the disk array is the storage," says Tanner. "Using a storage server letsyou use multiple or different arrays."

Duplessie further separates the two terms. "A storage server typically speaks to files and talks to people or applicationsover Ethernet," says Duplessie. "A disk array is a low-level block device that only speaks to an operating system."

Easy Storage for the SMB: Has the Time Come?Some storage vendors have an unrealistic idea of what constitutes appropriate storage solutions for small business.They'll tell you about "inexpensive systems" for under $100,000 or mind-boggling SAN architectures that are now"SMB ready." Any small business that's tried to implement one probably found out it wasn't nearly as ready as itsmanufacturer hoped.

"Most storage manufacturers attempt to put products into the small business space by stripping down their existingsolutions," says Ryan Malone, vice president of partner and channel development at Zetera Corp., a supplier of stor-age systems. "However the skill sets found in small businesses, and how they use storage, differ dramatically fromwhat you find in big enterprises."

The typical small business, of course, doesn't have specialized IT staff, which is a requirement to deploy SANs ofalmost any kind. If they are lucky, they have one IT person. If not, it's usually the boss spending late nights boningup on Storage for Dummies.



Inexpensive Storage BoxesThe good news is that 2006 perhaps marked the year when some storage systems actually deserved to be calledeasy to use and that prices continued to plummet.

"The biggest thing that I noticed is the decrease in prices that made everything more affordable," says ChipNickolett, owner of Comprehensive Solutions Inc., a small business based in Brookfield, Wisc., which offers IT serv-ices.

Electronics retailer Fry's, for example, recently advertised a 2 Terabyte (TB) NAS box for $1,699. The BuffaloTeraStation from Buffalo Technology may or may not be right for every small business, but you're unlikely to findanything better than the price - less than a dollar per GB.

Zetera's Hammer Z-Series is another inexpensive box, though far more feature rich than the TeraStation. It provides1TB of networked storage for $1,299, as well as a few features found in higher-end systems - better utilization, bet-ter performance, and more scalability. According to Malone, it has an installed base of more than 120,000 units andwas designed specifically for small businesses.

And there are plenty of other products around suitable for smaller concerns.

"The Infrant ReadyNAS NV by Infrant Technologies seems to come close to the ideal when it comes to satisfying the'S' side of SMB," says Rob Enderle, an analyst at the Enderle Group of San Jose, Calif.

ReadyNAS NV is a NAS appliance that a small business can plug in and run. It costs around $1,500 for 750 GB and$2,200 for 2TB.

Greg Schulz, an analyst at storage consultancy StorageIO Group of Minneapolis, suggests two other possibilities."The LeftHand Networks redeployment kit transforms HP Proliant servers into storage systems," he says. In addition, "NetApp StoreVault is a multi-function (SAN and NAS) storage system that scales to about 6TB as wellas snapshot and remote mirroring with starting prices under $10,000."

How's Them Apples?Apple Computer is another contender for the small business storage crown. Its Xserve server carries two dual-coreXeon processors (either 2.0, 2.66, or 3.0 GHz). The base configuration, at $2,999, includes three hard drive bays(up to 2.25 TB of storage, as opposed to 1.5 TB in the previous version), an optical drive, plenty of ports that willtake all kinds of connectors and an unlimited-client license of Mac OS X Server. All this comes in a very compactdesign.

It gets really interesting when you add in Apple's Xserve RAID box, which provides up to 7TB of storage in a smallform factor. Prices start at $6,000. "We've used the Apple Xserve RAID array for the past two or three years," saysNickolett. "We have two of them and love the performance, reliability, and cost."

According to Alex Grossman, senior director of server and storage hardware at Apple, Apple storage works out ataround $1.86 a GB. The company has also been upgrading its storage gear so that it uploads and downloadsfaster. Grossman says it is now twice as fast as the same unit of one year ago.

"We've shipped over 76 petabytes (PB) of storage in the past two years, with 40 percent of it going into non-Appleenvironments," says Grossman.

For more advanced SMB users, Xserve RAID can be transformed into a SAN known as the Apple Xsan relatively inex-pensively - when compared to traditional SAN expenditures. "You can convert Xserve to a SAN," says Nickolett."People using Linux or Unix seem concerned since it is from Apple, but to me this is one of the best all-around values."



Digital capture and photographic post-production firm Industrial Color, for example, has deployed an Apple Xsan.This small business operates a total of 21 Xserves and two Apple Xserve RAID boxes. Its Xsan holds 42 TB of digitalimages.

"We store our images on an Apple platform and use it to host our creative applications," says Christopher Mainor, ITdirector at Industrial Color. Retouchers access the photos residing on the Xsan to make the required changes. Everyversion is saved on the Xsan and can be retrieved at any time. In addition, each revision is backed up daily.

Do It Your DellMany smaller outfits, however, might not need a storage server to host company files. In some cases it is possible toget by with a regular server. Not everyone, after all, needs the amount of space required by companies like IndustrialColor.

In that case, a server such as Xserve, or an inexpensive box by HP, Gateway, IBM, Dell, or a white box provider maysuffice.

Custom theatrical drapery manufacturer Sew What? of Rancho Dominquez, Calif., for instance, uses a DellPowerEdge 860 server. Despite what the owner feels is rapid data growth, she still has plenty of room on the Dellmachine.

"Our Web site helped our business grow nearly 45 percent last year and managing all of the business it generatesrequires a lot of storage - from global customer information to thousands of drapery and fabric images toQuickBooks files," says Megan Duckett, a small-business owner and founder of Sew What? "With the power andscalability of the PowerEdge 860, we still have plenty of room to grow and soon will be able to host our Web site in-house."

The PowerEdge 860 has a dual-core Intel Xeon processor and 146 GB of internal storage for a price of around$1,000.

Storage HorizonsWhile that is a summary of some of the high points of small business storage at the dawn of 2007, most analystsagree that good times are ahead for the SMB sector.

"Small business owners can look forward to higher degrees of storage automation and even more aggressive pric-ing," says Enderle.

Schulz concurs. He believes that more solutions that are assigned and sized for the SMB space will come onto themarket. It's time for people who evaluated storage systems a few years back and were put off by price, complexity,or the potential return on investment to take another look, he says.

"Today's solutions are being designed, built, marketed, sold, and serviced with the small business customer inmind," says Schulz. "This means that they are more affordable, more scalable, more feature function laden, andmore robust than in the past."

Storage Capacity Planning: What's Enough?The days are long past when many small businesses could get by with their files stored on desktops or one smallserver. In an era of PowerPoint presentations, videos, and graphics, disk space fills up and maxes out too quickly.

"Digital storage demand is increasing from 30 to over 50 percent annually and is expected to steadily increase forthe foreseeable future," said Fred Moore, principal of Horison Information Strategies. "One of the big disk challengesis that capacity is growing 10 times faster than performance."



So how should companies deal with soaring storage capacity needs when they have little or no IT resources? Whatkind of storage should be added -- bigger disks, more servers, NAS, or some other option? As these come in awide range of speeds, features, and prices, how can this be done without under- or overbuying?

Twenty or Fewer Staff Some firms don't need to pay much to improve their storage situation. Relatively cheap and easy-to-use productsare available that won't require hiring an IT guy, yet will markedly improve the storage situation.

"Consolidation of data into a single repository makes for better management and most likely lower cost," said VictorGamaly, senior product marketing manager at NEC Corporation of America. "Larger storage servers have a higherdegree of scalability that allows greater flexibility when more capacity, performance, or connectivity is required."

Let's take a look at a few examples, starting with the lower-end machines. For the sake of simplicity, we'll say theyare suitable for companies with 20 or fewer staff. However, a company of 10 people that uses a lot of graphics filesmight need a whole lot more storage, and a firm of 50 staff with mild storage needs might get by with one of thesesmaller and simpler models.

A TeraStation from Buffalo Technology Inc. costs around $650. This is a rather bare bones box in terms of features,but it provides 1 TB of capacity. Another version holds double that capacity and sells for approximately $1,000. If anoffice has one overloaded server and needs to offload a large volume of basic documents and keep them availableover the network, this is a good solution.

The price per TB of the TeraStation compares favorably with the $3,500 required for a 2 TB Snap Server 410 byAdaptec. The Snap Server, though, has more bells and whistles such as various flavors of RAID protection, and theability to work well with multiple operating systems. For people who want a stronger features set without high spacedemands, Adaptec's lowest end box is the Snap Server 110. For $950, you can purchase 500 GB.

Around 50 Staff The models featured above are probably best for companies that either have no servers at all or currently haveeveryone sharing one server. By adding a TeraStation or small Snap Server, the company at least gains extra capaci-ty that is very easy to manage.

The next level up is NAS. NAS really comes in handy once you have more than one server. Just as multiple desk-tops can access one server to retrieve files, with NAS multiple servers access the NAS box that holds the storeddata.

"With one server serving data, there is rarely the economics or the pain to move to networked storage," said SajaiKrishnan, a general manager at Network Appliance. "We see interest in networked storage rising when there arethree or four servers, one of which has critical data."

At that stage, the challenge of reliably managing and backing-up the servers consumes enough time that companiesbegin to understand the value of NAS - and are willing to pay for it. Features that Krishnan suggests SMB will findappealing include:

• Reliability: It's the company's data that you have on the appliance. You have to be comfortable that the storagedevice is dependable.

• Scalability: You need room to grow. An appliance that lets you easily add storage on the fly allows you to trackstorage growth to business growth.

• Flexibility: As the business grows you'll likely need to add applications (e-mail, databases) to this networked stor-age; look for a device that can handle application storage or share files.



Krishnan recommends the StoreVault S500 because, in addition to meeting the above criteria, it provides protectionagainst two disks in the system going down and alerts for disks that are starting to show instability. It holds up to 12SATA hard drives (at either 250 GB or 500 GB capacities). A 2 TB StoreVault S500 equipped with eight 250GB harddrives, for example, costs less than $7,000. Fully loaded (6TB), a StoreVault costs around $14,000.

Another option is the ISS storage server by Cutting Edge Network Storage Solutions. It has 2.2 TB of RAID capacitythat can be split up into different volumes for different departments or purposes. Pricing begins at $7,000. A CuttingEdge MSS NAS box with 1.5 TB begins at $10,000.

EMC Corp. also now offers SMB storage. Its CLARiiON AX150 RAID array has built in hardware redundancy, as wellas data integrity features and multiple TB of capacity depending on the configuration. The AX150 begins under$6,000.

One Hundred or More As storage needs grow, so do the number of possible systems.

The Adaptec Snap Server 650 can scale up to 64.2 TB. It is built on dual-core 64-bit AMD Opteron processors,along with 2GB of memory to make it really fast. Prices start around $16,000.

"The business may require greater speed when the number of transactions increase, response time to their cus-tomers' decrease, when back up windows are impacting online transactions, and when losing data will have a cata-strophic impact to the business," said NEC's Gamaly.

NEC sells several storage arrays. The D1-10 and S-1500 would be good for companies with less than 100 people,whereas the D3-10 or the S2500 would be more suitable for 100 or more employees. Pricing starts at: $16,430 forthe S-Series and at $15,000 for the D-Series.

EMC's CLARiiON CX3-10 UltraScale system is designed for the needs of larger SMBs. The list price for a systemwith five 146 GB hard drives is $27,000. This box can scale up to can scale up to 30 TB.

SizingHow should a small business go about the job of sizing their systems appropriately? Michael Ehman, CEO ofCutting Edge says there are three areas to consider:

1. How many other activities does the file server handle? It's important to provide employees with a positive experi-ence when they access the network file share. If it takes too long to open a share, find a file, or transfer data, it willadversely affect worker productivity. Given the cost of fielding employees, they must be kept at optimal efficiency.

2. How many individuals are in the workgroup and what type of network traffic do they generate? If it's just generalbusiness activity, a lightly used file server could service up to 10 people, he said. If the organization uses video filesor other large-size files, then this number will decrease.

3. Another issue is the number of files hosted on a network share. As this number approaches several hundredthousand files, an optimized file server such as a NAS box or storage server provides better performance foremployees than does a generic fileserver.

Ehman estimates the amount of storage a company will need by adding up the data volume on an organization'sdesktops and servers. Then he assumes five daily backups (5X), five weekly backups (5X), and 12 monthly backups(12X). As a rule, that equates to about 20X overall in terms of the total capacity required for backups. Then he fac-tors in growth. It's best to expect annual doubling to be on the safe side. If a company has 200 GB of total data,therefore, an 8 TB net system would provide space for backup capacity and future growth.



This content was adapted from internet.com's ServerWatch and SmallBusinessComputing Web sites, andEarthWeb's EnterpriseStorageForum Web site. Contributors: Drew Robb and Steve Apiki.



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