Scalable Mid-Range NAS Products Hit The Sweet Spot

In the November 2000 issue of Business Solutions, we addressed the issue of NAS (network attached storage) by saying the news was good and bad. There were growing opportunities in the NAS market, despite the fact that the market was not growing as fast as everyone had hoped it would. Two vendors now believe that market is finally growing, and that the opportunities continue to abound.

"What we have seen over the past year is a lot of hype about mid-range NAS," said Dick Vanek, president and CEO of Carrollton, TX-based Excel/Meridian Data, Inc. "Everyone was talking about NAS, but not many VARs were selling it. What we are actually seeing now is all of our hard work in promoting this product coming to fruition. The end user is less afraid of making the plunge into NAS. End users are seeing the benefits of NAS and are finally starting to understand the technology."

By mid-range NAS, Vanek is referring to devices with a price range from $5,000 to $40,000. Vanek believes that acceptance and understanding by end users resulted in the increased NAS sales his company has seen of late. He also sees application-specific niche markets that integrators are having success deploying into. "That is what has really been kicking in for us," he said.

So what are those niches? Vanek points to medical and financial imaging as the best markets for NAS, but added, "Really, any large capacity storage is a potential NAS sale. NAS will typically be an add-on to storage systems that have reached their capacity. End users will start off with lower end NAS products, which work fine until they start moving into more complicated networks, especially where multiple operating systems are involved. All of a sudden these low-end NAS products are not sophisticated enough to handle the application. They are also not scalable enough. The whole idea behind a NAS is that you want something that can scale."

Adding More Storage To A NAS
Vanek stated that end users purchasing NAS solutions do not want to purchase a new NAS appliance every time they need additional storage. "You want a NAS that is scalable within itself, and then you can add additional NAS appliances when the capacity on one appliance runs out," he said. "Some integrators that have been selling non-scalable NAS appliances for the past year are coming back to us and saying they will never do it again. They are starting to see the value in a mid-range NAS solution that is scalable and has fault tolerance."

Erik Norlander, director of product marketing for Plymouth, MN-based Tricord Systems, Inc., sees growth opportunities for both SAN and NAS on the horizon, which originated with the separation of storage from servers. "Storage became detached from servers because of the desire of end users to invest in the storage they need," he said, "instead of being locked into buying servers and storage together."

Advantages Over SANs
Norlander feels that SANs have been challenged by their complexity and interoperability issues, as well as their cost. He believes that is the main factor driving the NAS market. "NAS allows organizations to deploy network storage based on existing infrastructures and with existing management tools," he said. "The challenges today in the NAS space center on the ability of organizations to forecast their growth needs."

Norlander agrees that the ability to scale a NAS appliance is important to end users. So is the ability to manage it over time. He thinks the greatest opportunity for NAS moving forward will be the ability to allow multiple NAS devices to seamlessly scale together. "End users want to grow their storage pool without introducing substantial, incremental management burdens," he said. "We continue to see organizations challenged by management costs that are anywhere from six to eight times the life cycle cost of acquiring the storage solution itself. As an industry, we need to work on reducing that management cost that organizations incur."

NAS opportunities also exist for VARs or partners that have a good SAN practice. Those resellers may be missing out on opportunities by not offering a NAS solution. "Having only a SAN-based solution may limit their opportunities," said Norlander. "VARs should sell both cars and trucks. Otherwise you are putting limits on your income potential."