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

I'll just point out one thing. Obviously, we're very heavily partnered with Microsoft and we have, for example, a small business server edition. So it's about how we're packaging our technology to meet that particular need, to get to the price point that is desirable for SMBs.

Marrone-Hurley: It is interesting that you actually used the term "attack" the SMB market. Some of you already addressed this, but I think it's important that we're seeing this surge of everyone really focusing in on the SMBs at this point in time. And I actually had this question posed to me by the press: Why now? What's changed? What is it that is enabling us to go after this market? Were we just ignoring it in the past, or is it that there are new standards or that there are new technologies? What do you believe it is that's now enabling you, in your organization, to be able to go after this market and want to target this market? Would anyone like to comment?

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Lofgren: Shockingly, I've got an opinion on that. I think the focus has now been ratcheted up for several reasons. There has been focus on the midrange market for some time. Obviously CA's been in this market for quite some time and other players are also getting interested in it. But I think you have to look at the SMB market from two aspects. There's SMB as a customer, and there's SMB as technology. SMB as a customer, we're trying to go after. Then there's technology we are building for the SMB customer that, in effect, could be used by what we would call the higher end customer, the data center. And that is because of the introduction of new technologies. Things like when we start introducing less expensive disk drives, like SATA drives, for example. That gives us a lot of capabilities to introduce less expensive storage.

Now, one of the things that I truly believe is that in the longer term, we're going to move towards this new--well, not a new--storage cost paradigm, because storage hardware costs go down 34 to 35 percent per year every year now, and have from the beginning of time. But the idea is that now I can build some really inexpensive storage infrastructure using iSCSI, using ATA. I could be using Linux servers, for example. We're opening up this market that before perhaps couldn't "get" the storage area network technology, but in the future it might be able to. And if you take a look at Fibre Channel, prices are continuing to come down, so that's going to become a driver there. Disks in general continue to go down. And it really heightens the need for the management piece. Just because the hardware's less expensive doesn't mean that the management needs are any less critical. And you can't be selling software in that space in the same way you're selling it directly to the high-end end users. Again, you've got to have distribution channels, you've got to have the feature functions and you've got to have partnerships.

Padovani: We have been selling storage to the SMB space for quite a period of time--several years--and what we're talking about today is just the SAN component. And SANs have been Fibre Channel and very expensive to implement, requiring a technology and experience knowledge base to be able to deploy them. Because of the standards work that has been done with SNIA (and there's a lot of the partners up here on stage) we've really made solutions simpler. We've also found ways to draw the cost out of delivering those solutions. It's not because things are sort of "coming together," it's because we're getting to price points that we feel are going to be acceptable to the SMB market. It's an evolutionary process, and I think that's just where we're coming from and why we're able to address the SMB space. In the SMB space today, NAS solutions have been there--and for quite a while. There's obviously external storage, direct attached. But now, because of the costs, the standards, the interoperability, the choice, the consolidation of the management solutions coming together, that makes it a lot easier for people to deploy and implement SANs without having to worry about the technology that they're deploying--whether it's Fibre Channel or iSCSI.