The looming SAN storm in the SMB market: part 1 of a roundtable discussion on the emerging SAN market for small to medium-sized businesses sponsored by Computer Associates, Dell, Emulex, Intel and Microsoft

Computer Technology Review, June, 2004

Marrone-Hurley: Thank you for coming. I'm a senior analyst with the Enterprise Storage Group--actually soon to change our name to Enterprise Strategy Group--and I will be the moderator for today's panel in which we'll discuss storage solutions for the SMB market.

What's interesting about this particular panel is that this wasn't really on the SNW agenda. This is actually something that the vendors represented here today sponsored because they felt it was really important that you folks that are covering this industry understand what they are doing in this market, and what products they are offering in order to target the storage needs of the SMB market. I'll be posing questions to the panel and, after we're done with that discussion, we'll open it up for Q & A for you folks.

First, let me introduce our panelists. Claude Lorenson is the technical product manager for storage technologies at Microsoft. Mike Wall is the general manager for the storage components division of the networking and storage group at Intel. Next is Mike Smith, the executive vice president of worldwide marketing at Emulex. Marc Padovani is a senior product marketing manager at Dell. And, from Computer Associates, is Anders Lofgren, the vice president of BrightStor product management products.

I'm going to just start this off and ask you guys to very quickly review what your product offerings are and how you are actually targeting the SMB market. Claude, why don't you start?

Lorenson: Good morning, everybody. Microsoft has traditionally been pretty successful at introducing solutions for the SMB market. So the interest for us in the smaller type of businesses and medium businesses for SANs is really to offer customers choices. When they want to move from, say, a direct attached storage environment to a networking infrastructure for their storage, we would like to make sure that they have solutions from Microsoft that are easy to deploy and easy to install for that marketplace. Our initiative is really making Windows Server an easier platform to deploy on a SAN, and also introducing new technologies for networking, like iSCSI, which some customers in our group will find attractive when they move from DAS to SAN. So that's really our focus.

We already have a lot of Windows Servers in the SMB business, and our goal is to make them easier and more compatible with storage networking as they go forward and as our customers move from DAS to SAN.

Marrone-Hurley: Mike Wall, how about Intel?

Wall: Well, Intel has been supplying, primarily, silicon building blocks for the industry for the last seven or eight years now. We sell a family of I/O processors, most of which are the engines that fuel RAID applications. As you know, we also have Pentium processors that a lot of the network attached storage platforms are based on. So, primarily, lots of silicon building blocks. We do have a RAID product family that we've been shipping for awhile. And one of our focus areas moving forward is to really get the whole ecosystem focused on standards so that we can fuel the improvement in cost performance that would be attractive to small and medium businesses. We'll talk about some of these standards today--such as Serial ATA and Serial-attached SCSI, SMI-S and PCI Express--and embedding those things into our silicon to make it more affordable for solution providers.

Marrone-Hurley: Mike Smith, how about what Emulex is doing for this marketplace?

Smith: Thanks, Nancy. Today, Emulex is a leading provider of technologies for the SAN market. Our principal products today are Fibre Channel host bus adapters, I/O controllers and a new product line for embedded storage switching. Historically, our target markets have been the higher end segments with a data center focus, but that's changing. We're seeing a lot of interest in recent quarters in developing products for the small and mid-sized business segment. And I think that's a reflection of a couple of things. First, SANs are now considered a proven technology. They're no longer experimental or high-end or the kind of technology that requires a real particular expertise. Second, many of the companies at the upper end of the SMB category--which is a very large category--are facing similar problems that the data centers faced eight, nine, ten years ago, when they started looking at SANs. For example, the notion of having lots of servers that have storage trapped within, that is difficult to reallocate or difficult to backup--some portion of these companies are looking for ways to solve that problem.

We believe Fibre Channel can be a great solution for some of these companies. By no means will it take over the SMB market. We expect Fibre Channel to coexist in that market with iSCSI and DAS and, to that end, we are developing products targeted specifically at this space. We've already announced SMB products earlier in the year, and we've got products on display in our booth on the floor.

Marrone-Hurley: Thank you. So, Marc, obviously this is not a market that's new to Dell; but what are you doing in the lines of targeting their storage environments?