Wyman claims that in the four years it has been in operation locally, it has growth to some 27,000 customers in Australia and New Zealand, with the majority of those being in the small business, 1-5 server space. “It’s relatively straight forward,” Wyman said. “You talk to any end-user, and one of his three biggest problems is the recoverability of data after a crash, corruption or virus, and with tape it’s slow, complex, tedious, painful and expensive.” The Holy Grail for backup recovery, according to Wyman, is a situation where customers are able to do a local back-up to disc, that then gets replicated to an offsite repository - say, at a partner’s location, or the home office of the managing director. As that Grail becomes easier to achieve the market transition will accelerate further as a result. “Over the next 3-5 years, it’s going to make a fairly rapid transition to offsite archival also being to disc,” he said.
What they’re looking for So, what SMBs need is a solution that will cause them a minimum number of headaches. It needs to be one they can recover from data loss quickly with, and one that can be administered by an organisation that might not have a standing IT staff. “For a SMB it’s paramount around ease of use and total cost of ownership,” EMC Australia and New Zealand marketing manager, storage platforms, Mark Oakey, said. “For us it starts with Iomega [see sidebar]. What we’re trying to do here is start to change the economics of the storage strategy so the reseller can really start to position and take our storage solutions, and applies it to a turn key or vertical solution that they can take into the SMB customer, and that’s built around simplicity and efficiency. “Making sure it’s agile, flexible, and easier to manage, with set-and-forget policies that they can arrange and change on a need-to basis, while having the lowest cost per gigabit.” SMBs don’t want inferior technologies, but they do struggle with a lack of IT staff and budgets. For this reason, emerging storage techniques, and finding a systems integrator partner they can trust is high on the list of things to do for the smaller organisations.
