SAN coming to SMBIt is a measure of the strength of small to medium business buying power that the technologies once considered enterprise-only are making their way into smaller companies. One of those technologies is the storage area network or SAN. SAN technology is the most effective form of storage pooling and has been the envy of the proverbial SMB's eye, until they saw the price tag. Fibre Channel SANs are costly and you need an expert on site to run it and maintain it. However, that was the only option for many years. Many SAN vendors have assumed that price is everything to the SMB and have assumed that they will buy on that criteria alone. One executive suggests that there is a bait-and-switch play in which half-sized products are offered at half the price, just to get the entree and then upsell to a more expensive subsystem. However, that could well be short-sighted. SAN vendors have heeded the call of the SMB, many of whom are quite storage-savvy but the offerings are only now entering the marketplace. But the buyer must beware, in some cases, smaller SANs are based on a single controller rather than a standard dual-controller system. The buyer needs to be sure of their present and future capacity. Must you have a Fibre Channel setup, or will an IP SAN work into your budget and topology better? For SMB-class SANs from IBM or HP or Dell/EMC are more or less priced at $11,000, disk drives at about $900 each. A SATA-based IP SAN, built by Zetera and marketed by companies such as Bell Micro and Netgear, are priced for the budget-conscious IT manager. An entire system? It can cost from about $2,000 to $20,000. The SMB-class SAN is available, but due diligence in buying is a must. Flex that bargaining power!
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Acronis Inc. Backup software.