SMBS FROM PAGE 8 data center and a lack of real estate Industry Standard Servers business
America, in Palo Alto, Calif. in the data center,” said Novotny. “A unit at HP. “We are taking technology
“We have seen a bridge market lot of SMB customers are maxed out, and innovations across HP consumer
emerging,” said Claus Mikkelsen, and rather than adding space for rack- to enterprise and packaging an opti-
chief scientist at Hitachi Data Sys- mount servers, they look at blades.” mal solution for the SMB market,”
tems, in Santa Clara, Calif. “Many They also are looking at storage, Potter said.
customers are small in terms of size said Robin Hensley, Another area of SMB technol-
and revenue but enterprise customers vice president of world- ogy growth is communications.
to us in terms of demands for products wide storage blades at The convergence of IT systems
and features.” with voice and even video is bring-
At the same time, these smaller ing affordable communication
companies face unique challenges. STORAGE systems into the market. Inacom’s
Companies with 100 to 1,000 employ- VENDOR: Hitachi Data Systems Benson said buying different tech-
ees, for instance, may have needs simi- PRODUCT NAME: Hitachi Universal nologies from different sources is
lar to those of large corporations, but Storage Platform VM costly, which is why something
they address them differently, said DATE AVAILABLE: September 2007 such as unified communications,
Deborah Nelson, senior vice presi- DESCRIPTION: A heterogeneous which combines e-mail and voice,
dent of marketing and alliances in storage services platform in a 19- is attractive to small businesses.
the Technology Solutions Group at inch rack that provides the benefits Market researcher Dell’Oro
Hewlett-Packard, in Palo Alto. of virtualization, thin provisioning Group predicts that IP lines in-
“They can’t afford to invest in and tiered storage in a solution stalled in SMBs to handle this
deep technology expertise across the that does not require a raised floor convergence of technologies will
broad spectrum of technology avail- data center and that operates on an grow 30 percent per year over the
able today,” Nelson said. “They take industry-standard, 220-volt power next five years to reach 60 percent
a practical approach. They want fast supply. penetration by 2011, compared
returns without compromising service with less than 20 percent today.
to customers.” HP Storage Works. “Small customers’ In addition, as SMBs increasingly
Simplicity is another important storage capacity needs are growing conclude that data is their most im-
check box on their shopping list. “For dramatically,” she said, noting that portant asset, security is moving to the
SMBs, the most important thing is ease e-mail attachments such as photos forefront of their technology adoption.
of use,” said Avinash Arun, an analyst and videos alone increase the need In its SMB State of Security study re-
at AMI-Partners. “The fact is that a lot for storage capacity. “Added to that leased in August, Websense found that
of SMBs, especially if you go to lower are huge concerns about disaster re- although 46 percent of SMB IT man-
employee sizes, don’t have the ability covery and data protection,” Hensley agers have software to protect confi-
to adopt and support these new tech- said. dential data, most do not use software
nologies. Complexity is a no-no. Cost is As with other technology areas, ven- to block the use of peer-to-peer applica-
another issue, but ease of use and ease dors are building storage solutions tions (81 percent) or USB devices (80
of maintenance are top priority.” specifically for SMB environments, percent), or control the use of instant
which is the case with HP’s “Shorty” messaging ( 76 percent).
What to do? all-in-one storage solu- “Web security is very
with priorities such as cost, ease tion, said Mark Potter, important for SMBs
BLADE SERVER
of use and even the physical space to vice president in the VENDOR: IBM because these com-accommodate equipment, ven- PRODUCT NAME: BladeCenter S panies are expanding
dors are working hard to meet DATE AVAILABLE: Q4 2007 and not building out
customer demands. That’s why, DESCRIPTION: A blade system infrastructure but
for instance, IBM and HP have specifically created for SMBs that creating connectivity
put space-saving blade servers promises to reduce the number of with partners,” said
into the hands of SMBs. servers operated by an average Mike Wood, product
“A lot of that demand [for SMB by 85 percent. manager at Websense,
blades from SMBs] is driven by in San Diego. “By con-cost of running servers in the [CONTINUED ON PAGE 12]
