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

Padovani: Dell has its strong leadership position in the SMB space. We have a leadership position in our server line, PowerEdge Servers. In the storage space, our PowerVault external storage arrays have a strong play, as well as our award-winning PowerVault NAS product line. What we've seen in our operations, and in how Dell drives business, is through standards. Standards are key for the small business. They're looking for a lot of ease of use, lower cost solutions and performance. Traditionally, SANs have not had the benefit of a strong standards play. But there's the work being done with SNIA on SMI-S. Another work that we think is important is standardizing RAID architectures. Driving standards will improve interoperability. Improved interoperability means that there are more choices for the small business customer, and having more choices means there's more competition in driving down cost. In the small business space entry SANS, you need to have mature technology, interoperability and standards, and really hit the cost points. Because if you don't hit the cost points, then the customer is going to rely on installing direct attached storage.

Marrone-Hurley: Anders, obviously CA has been playing in the storage market for quite some time. What about storage for the SMBs?

Lofgren: Obviously, for Computer Associates, the SMB market is an incredibly important space for us. What we're primarily known for is our BrightStor ARCserve backup product, and it's a product which we primarily sell through distribution channels. Although BrightStor ARCserve has been our key focus area for some time now--and we've been extremely successful with that product and we will continue to be extremely successful--I think there are some other products in the storage management space, such as storage resource management (SRM), SAN management, that do have some potential in those markets, given the right feature function set. Especially when you take a look at SRM products, there are some things that the SMB-type organizations are obviously struggling with, such as capacity utilization issues. The problem is that they're probably not aware of it. Many of the same problems you'll see in a data center you will see in that SMB space, except for the fact that they're not aware of it because they don't have the tools that actually identify these particular problems.

So there's some opportunity for things like SRM, for example, whereas I think the SAN management area is going to be a little less so because we're really dependent on the idea of bringing storage area networks down into that market. And although that is happening, and we do have some pricing challenges there that we need to get into with regard to hardware, we also need to address software pricing challenges. Because in the same way that the hardware piece of the pie is cost-sensitive, nobody's going to pay the same price for the software as well. So, to really attack the SMB space you need to be focusing on the price piece of it and how you package the products. In addition, it is my personal viewpoint that you can't be giving these customers 137 feature functions when they only need five. To give them 137 functions is actually a detriment because they only need those five and that's it. So it's a lot about packaging, and also a lot about partnership.