So much of what the storage industry focuses on is around the high dollar, high end, and high touch enterprises. While certainly the most sophisticated in their infrastructures they are also the most “beefed up” with expertise and staff to handle these very complex environments.

Now what about the rest of the world? What about the small doctors offices, law offices, graphics design companies, consultancy firms, retail stores and everything else in between? There is lots of data being generated and the need for a reliable storage infrastructure is just as important to the small business owner as it is for the largest of enterprises. The point I’m trying to make is that it’s all relative. Generally, storage and the protection of the data on it is very important.

How can a small business have the storage it needs with the protection it needs without breaking the bank? First, the storage solutions need to be simple. They also need to be able to serve multiple purposes. If the total storage need for a small business is one or two Terabytes, but the need is spread across a small email server, some industry specific database and some general file sharing needs, the decision has to be made as to how all those needs can be met without causing an unacceptable amount of maintenance and monitoring. Oh yeah, and don’t forget you’ll have to back all this critical data up too! And what’s the budget to spend all this? Not much!

In some cases a single server with ample amounts of storage can handle all outlined above. Email, databases, file sharing and even backup can all be handled off of one server. Expanding and scaling in the future may become a daunting and seemingly insurmountable challenge however. Plus, the evolution of storage needs usually can’t predict today what you will need next year or even 3 months from now.

Having some storage that can serve all the different applications of today and scale as required to support the unforeseen needs of tomorrow could be just what the doctor ordered.

Enter the current generation of Network Attached Storage (NAS) appliances. It used to be that all you could get in an affordable NAS device were some file sharing services and maybe some backup and antivirus integration. Today there are numerous vendors that have integrated iSCSI target services into their NAS devices to provide block-level services also to those hosts and applications that require that level of storage interaction all from the same storage appliance. With capacity scalability, snapshots, replication, and better integration with backup and antivirus infrastructures, the small and medium business now truly has an affordable option to deploy a simple and easy to manage solution that can meet their current storage needs of today and to grow as their business needs dictate.

Today’s NAS appliances can fit the bill for the small and medium business. File services, block services, scalability, backup and much, much more for under $10K! Does that seem like a steal to you? Again, it’s all relative, but in the world of storage if you’re paying less then $20,000 for a few Terabytes with a reasonable feature set, you’re getting a good deal.

For a small business the value of having a self-contained, simple to manage, do-it-all appliance can go a long way toward allowing the business owner to concentrate on the business and less on a complex IT infrastructure.

As always, let me know what you think.

Joe

This entry was posted on Friday, October 14th, 2005 and is filed under Storage Applications, Platforms, Advisor - Joe Disher. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.