Is it Fullsteam ahead for SANs?

As advanced storage systems become more affordable to the SMB market, resellers can look for opportunities. Perfekt COM's Keyser said SMBs couldn't afford to ignore the benefits of adopting networked storage. SAN technology in the SMB space, while far from saturated, was becoming a standard.

"A respectable SME business will have a SAN or at least be considering it by now," he said. "Otherwise, they are getting behind the times.

"Given the ongoing storage explosion, many companies need SAN technology to deal with the massive growth of data over the next year. Acceptance is becoming universal."

The tricky part about closing a sale in the mid-market and below is still getting a sympathetic ear from upper management.

Tough Sale

"We find IT managers can see the benefits and want to go ahead but, in the small to mid-market, it's a tough sale to management," Keyser said.

Once the SAN sale is well underway, the money-making endeavour in the mid-market is doing the ongoing upgrades associated with the implementation.

"We make money on maintenance of the box and, given raw hardware growth, there are upgrades required for software and hardware adapters," he said.

Global Storage's Duncan said integrators could expand the storage discussion to peddle other technologies.

"It's not just a SAN discussion, but a chat on virtualisation and improved backup and recovery," he said. "Key drivers include virtualisation of servers."

HDS is another vendor making aggressive SAN moves into the SMB space. With storage moving downstream, the company was aiming to make SAN implementation and management simpler, easier and less costly for SMBs, principal systems architect, Adrian Deluca, said.

The company recently rolled out a Microsoft-designation Simple SAN solution for Windows server environments. Deluca suggested the initiative was one of the biggest developments in mid-market SANs for some time.

"The Microsoft Simple SAN initiative is a challenge to all storage vendors," he said. "It is offering a set of standards in the Microsoft server platform to interconnect the storage infrastructure components.

"It's a young initiative and we'll rapidly see host bus adapter (HBA), switch and storage vendors announcing they are Simple SAN-compliant."

Essentially, the initiative aims to ease complexity by ensuring interoperability of storage resources in the Windows platform and simplifying hardware set up.

HDS is rolling out plug-and-play SAN kits compatible with Microsoft Simple SAN for Windows Server 2003 on its Hitachi TagmaStore Adaptable Modular Storage and Workgroup Modular Storage.

The kits - which provide out-of-the box SANs for SMB - includes Fibre Channel switches, HBAs, cabling and software that automates the process with wizards and manages the switch through a single console, HBA and storage system. Seeing huge market potential, HDS decided to expand its SAN repertoire.

"We have traditionally pointed our guns at the enterprise space, but realise the SME market has the largest growth rates," Deluca said. "There are 3 million organisations with 5-29 servers that could, or should be, running SANs.

"They need simplicity given they don't have dedicated storage resource experience. The SME market is not trained up on SANs."