Enterprise storage vendors cosy up to small businesses

“From the data-management point of view, small and medium businesses face similar challenges to large organisations,” says Bartek Mytnik, EMEA sales manager at network storage developer Qsan Technology.

“The amount of data they need to tackle grows rapidly, but the budgets do not.

“High performance, SSD caching, synchronous replication and the like – for the first time, functions and software considered 'enterprise' till not so long ago are within the budget of practically any organisation.

"There are plenty of vendors that offer feature-packed quality storage arrays with top-notch support services.”

He adds that it is not yet a server market, where virtualisation drove infrastructure costs down and made it possible for alternative cost-performance vendors such as Quanta Computer to threaten the biggest market players.

"In the case of the data storage industry, the natural trend of technology moving down market from enterprise to SMB and increasing budget cuts that affected large organisations makes all the vendors look with a kinder eye on this segment of the market,” he says.

Cloud on the horizon

The other big factor delivering enterprise-class technology to SMBs is, of course, the cloud. As well as removing the need for users to buy and manage their own enterprise-grade hardware and software, the cloud has also dramatically cut the cost of selling products and services.

That is because it provides an alternative route to market, so a sale to a small customer doesn't have to go through the expensive enterprise-grade sales department, and that in turn means suppliers of enterprise-class services can target SMBs as well.

"Cloud can give a technological boost that would normally be unaffordable for the small business”

“Even though many small and medium business owners are puzzled by cloud technology, it slowly becomes an integral part of a company's infrastructure. And that’s really good because cloud can give a technological boost that would normally be unaffordable for the small business,” says Mytnik.

“Another good thing about cloud computing for the small-business owner is that traditional NAS box providers have had to lower prices to compete with cloud offerings.”

Horne agrees. “Service providers who used to aim at the mid-size and large enterprise are realising there's quite a healthy SMB market too,” he says.

“They couldn't get down to the cost of sale there before, but now with the cloud and multi-tenancy it doesn't matter if the customer is five people or 5,000.

“When I had a small business, I went down to PC World Business Centre and bought stuff, and a pair of guys turned up and installed it and gave me a box of tapes labelled 'Monday to Saturday'.

"Now, architectures that were for enterprises 10 years ago are available to start-ups. For example, once upon a time only enterprises could afford co-location or hosted backup, but now we can all have shared architectures in the cloud.

“Today if I'm an SMB, I might buy Flash or tiered storage to sit in my data centre for my low-latency databases, but consume the rest – for example document management – as cloud services. That's an analogue of what large companies have done for a while.”

The rapidly advancing capability and usability of storage software also means that SMBs can set up private clouds with file synchronisation and sharing – another technology that not so long ago was regarded as very much an enterprise tool.

On the one hand, this can help if the business objects to putting valuable company data into public cloud services, while on the other it can help businesses pull back all that intellectual property currently going into consumer cloud storage such as Dropbox, iCloud or OneDrive because they are so much simpler and more accessible than the company network share.

“A good way to deal with cloud integration would be to start with a transparent strategy of what would be used as shared files,” says Mytnik.

“It sounds obvious, but even the largest corporations have security issues precisely because of badly designed procedures and rules of managing access and content in the cloud. As a result, they are very reluctant to move whole data flow to cloud providers.

"A combination of an on-site storage for sensitive or legally restrained data with cloud content seems to be the right way to go for many organisations.”

And of course with all of these changes – the cloud, more intuitive admin tools, consumerisation, commoditisation and so on – the focus is increasingly shifting away from the technology and towards services. Could that be yet another factor in favour of the SMB generalist?

Horne thinks so. “Storage admins are turning into service developers. It's much more interesting understanding the service than being an admin,” he says.

“You will always need sysadmins, but they will evolve into service admins and service developers.” ®