Higher storage quality for small businesses in 2005
Higher storage quality for small businesses in 2005
Jan 4, 2005: The outlook for 2005 looks even brighter for smaller businesses with storage products normally designed for big companies being tailored specifically to meet the needs of smaller companies.
Virtualisation technology is also set to evolve so that small companies will be able to manage their data more conveniently in the future and increase the performance of applications.
Peter Weston, the business manager for DataCore in South Asia, outlined the new trends for 2005: "High-end storage capabilities are finding new channels to go "down market". DataCore has typically sold to high-end data centres, which are the domain of the big storage companies, such as EMC.
"However, what if you can bypass the traditional high-end storage vendors and get to end-users directly via the PC channel - that's what DataCore is doing. We believe that once users get a "taste" of a simple and powerful SAN, then we can use the VAR channels to sell upgrade and services to grow the SANs. We are looking to grow our base of storage VARs in Australia."
Weston went on to explain why today's virtualisation will be different from the past: "The real issue is how to radically "ease the management of disk space", maintain performance levels and how to incorporate low-cost technologies like iSCSI and SATA. Therefore, being open and allowing new technologies as they develop to be incorporated are key."
Jon Toigo, the CEO of Toigo Partners International, talked about the new advances in open storage virtualisation technology. "The current manual approaches for provisioning storage often require hours not seconds to create volumes and make them available to an application or an end user.
"Many of the newer virtualisation products on the market require users to lock in to a specific hardware vendor's 'solution set' and concerns remain over whose hardware can be included in the hardware-based virtualisation scheme. DataCore's approach is superior.
"I am hard pressed to think of any other storage software vendor who offers anything close in terms of giving users so much choice on which vendor's disks and hardware use."
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