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UNDERVALUED, POORLY SERVED

From STORAGE Magazine Vol 7, Issue 7 - October 2007

The I.T. industry has grossly under-served small and medium-sized business customers in meeting their storage needs, says industry guru Michael Dell. BRIAN WALL REPORTS

Speaking via satellite at a customer event in London, Dell CEO Michael Dell has hit out at those who, he says, have let down the SMB (small and medium-sized business) market: "Growing businesses are quickly reaching a breaking point in their ability to store and manage all this data being created. Historically, the industry has presented SMBs with two options for storage: either buy a rudimentary storage solution that lacks capacity and basic software or buy a 'de-featured' product, originally designed for large businesses. So it either doesn't do enough or it costs too much. We will change that."

Michael Dell points to what has been a massive global explosion in data growth, as does Todd Forsythe, Dell global VP marketing: "The volume of data is now going way out of control," he says. All the more reason, they argue, for the SMB community to be properly looked after - at a price point that does not exploit their relative lack of buying power and need for more powerful storage solutions.

The data explosion almost defies belief. It is estimated that last year alone 161 exabytes (161 billion gigabytes) of data were generated.

The figure is a calculation that research analyst IDC came up with, which, it says, is "equivalent to 12 stacks of books reaching from the Earth to the sun". This digital universe equals approximately three million times the information in all the books ever written.

According to IDC, the amount of information that will be created and copied in 2010 will surge more than sixfold to 988 exabytes (988 billion gigabytes), representing a compound annual growth rate of 57%.

It also estimates that the world actually had 185 exabytes of storage available last year and will have 601 exabytes in 2010, meaning we are rapidly running out of physical space to store this level of information.

While nearly 70% of the digital universe will be user-generated by 2010, most of this content will be touched by an organisation along the way, either on a network, in a data centre, at a hosting site, at a telephone or internet switch, or in a back-up system, states IDC.

Businesses of all sizes, agencies, governments and associations will be responsible for the security, privacy, reliability and compliance of at least 85% of the information.

"The incredible growth and sheer amount of the different types of information being generated from so many different places represents more than just a worldwide information explosion of unprecedented scale," says John Gantz, chief research officer at IDC. "It represents an entire shift in how information has moved from analogue form, where it was finite, to digital form, where it is infinite.

"From a technology perspective, organisations will need to employ ever more sophisticated techniques to transport, store, secure and replicate the additional information being generated every day."

IDC researchers believe that the rapid uptake of technologies such as CCTV cameras, along with tight regulations regarding the long-term preservation of corporate data, are key factors behind the massive increase in data creation.

In its White Paper, 'The Expanding Digital Universe: A Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2010', sponsored by EMC, IDC goes on to say: "YouTube, a company that didn't exist just a few years ago, hosts 100 million video streams a day.

“Experts say that more than a billion songs a day are shared over the Internet in MP3 format. Digital bits. London's 200 traffic surveillance cameras send 64 trillion bits a day to the command data centre.

“Chevron's CIO says his company accumulates data at the rate of 2 terabytes - 17,592,000,000,000 bits - a day. TV broadcasting is going all-digital by the end of the decade in most countries. More digital bits," says the IDC report. And it is against this backdrop that Dell was launching its newest storage area network (SAN) array, the MD3000i, which it describes as a simplified storage consolidation solution designed specifically for SMB customers.

driving change
"We are committed to IT simplification for our customers and changing the economics of storage," Michael Dell continues. "The MD3000i is a perfect example of how we drive out costs, drive up functionality, and drive industry adoption of technologies and standards to meet customer needs."

According to Steve Duplessie, senior analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group, "the storage industry always reacts to new 'lower-end' market opportunities by taking their high-cost products and dumbing them down, so they can reach a lower price point. They do this to protect their high-end customer who pays a premium for high-end function, but the end result is always disappointing to the new market."

Data growth continues unabated, yet research shows less than 20% of small businesses and fewer than one-third of medium-sized businesses use advanced storage technologies such as SANs. While 41% of small businesses say expanding storage capacity is a top priority for the next 12 months, Fibre Channel SANs are seen as too costly, too complex and require special skills that many SMBs do not have.

The Dell MD3000i is described as an easy-to-use, expandable iSCSI SAN array, leveraging the modularity and availability of the Dell Modular Disk series. It aims to provide a simplified solution - from installation to ongoing maintenance and management, to powerful performance and the ability to grow as a business grows.

breakthrough
"iSCSI is the breakthrough technology revolutionising storage for SMBs," says Paul Kaeley, director, global storage consulting practice, Dell. "The MD3000i delivers features that a few years ago would have only been found on systems costing five to ten times more. Complexity is the bane of the SMB customer's existence and iSCSI cuts right through it."

Tellurian Networks, a Dell PowerVault MD3000i beta tester, is a global provider of electronic practice management and medical records hosting solutions. Tellurian has more than 10,000 clients around the world to which it provides Internet connectivity, email hosting, spam protection, web hosting, co-location and managed hosting services.

"For us, the snapshot capability was one of the key selling items," says Robert Boyle, CEO, Tellurian Networks. "We were pleasantly surprised to find such a high-end capability in an iSCSI-based system."

Adds Kaeley: "At Dell, our goal is to provide the SMB customer with a complete iSCSI-based infrastructure. This includes our PowerEdge servers, PowerConnect network switches and PowerVault storage options that are all designed specifically for iSCSI. This solution makes it easier for our customers to get and grow the capacity they need." ST