Articles

RSS

According to recent IDC research, global IT storage capacity is growing about 60% each year. With nearly 75% of small businesses and 85% of medium businesses in the United States committed to increasing their storage capacities in the next 12 months, the market is offering many opportunities for channel partners selling storage solutions to SMBs.

Several factors have contributed to the growing need for storage. Regulatory requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) require smaller businesses to strengthen their information risk management systems with solutions to store and organize larger amounts of data. This increase in mandated data retention is creating a catch-22 unique to the SMB market — SMB IT managers are often under pressure to reduce the resources they dedicate to IT storage management, while regulatory requirements mandating dramatic increases in data retention are increasing their management loads.

That said, one great opportunity for channel partners selling storage solutions to the SMB market is 'simple' solutions that improve backup/recovery and resource utilization efficiency. A number of technologies have emerged that are designed specifically to minimize the amount of human and financial capital dedicated to maintaining progressively complex storage systems, including virtualization, deduplication, and all-in-one storage solutions.

Capitalize On These Storage Sales Opportunities
Virtualization increases storage efficiency and resource utilization by reducing the physical space dedicated to complex server farms — a common pain point for SMB customers. Although the amount of total storage capacity allocated to virtualized servers is still fairly small (relative to existing SAN (storage area network)-attached servers), IDC reports that many SMB customers are requesting virtual server environments for new application deployments. IDC released a report in December 2007, reporting that just under half of virtualized servers connected to SANs in 2008 will use iSCSI (internet small computer systems interface) as the supporting SAN fabric for their consolidated servers. As a consequence, IDC believes that virtually all iSCSI storage solutions deployed in 2008 will be connected to servers running server virtualization software.

Deduplication helps minimize the amount of network traffic associated with transmitting multiple copies of the same file among storage servers, which helps make it easier for SMBs to enforce, audit, and monitor compliance to corporate and regulatory policies by reducing the number of copies of any given file. IDC has noted that data deduplication also implicates emerging trends in eco-friendly business. As executives focus more of their attention on ecologically sustainable IT solutions, technologies that ensure storage efficiency can drive opportunities for resellers to sell deduplication solutions.

All-in-one storage solutions (joint server/storage sales) can provide additional growth opportunities for SMBs, who oftentimes have limited human and financial resources and require storage systems that are easy to install and manage within their existing server farms. Emerging storage blade architectures have allowed smaller businesses with limited IT resources to extend their storage capacities within existing server environments by enabling them to combine various server, storage, and network mechanisms into a single management console. Storage blade architectures are ideally suited for SMB customers looking to expand the storage capacity of their blade server environments through attached, rather than networked, resources.

Complex problems often require expert solutions, and today's networked storage solutions require the experience of authorized channel resellers to help guide SMBs in deploying these viable systems. With so much opportunity in the growing SMB market, there are innumerable opportunities for reseller partners to grow and expand their businesses while helping to address a growing business need.

Ramona Thibeault is the VP of SMB sales for the HP Solution Partners Organization - Americas. Thibeault is responsible for further driving HP's momentum in the SMB market, working across HP's three business units to develop and implement SMB-specific growth strategies with the Solution Partner Organization's SMB sales, partner marketing, and Regional Business Unit teams. Additionally, Thibeault oversees HP's SMB pipeline management and forecasting processes and leads HP's SMB Partner Advisory Council.