RAM | Reseller Advocate Magazine: Issue 54

by William Van Winkle

LIKE most of us who've been in this industry a while, I started on an XT with a 10MB hard drive, and I still have the data files I wrote onto that drive over 15 years ago. Today, I have over 3TB of storage in my office alone, over 4TB counting the rest of the house, and I'm sitting here watching the clock, wondering how long it'll be before my burgeoning video collection forces me to double my capacity yet again—and what device(s) I'll use to accomplish the task.

My main tower has four hard drives internally and five externals attached via USB and FireWire. The shining star of the collection is Maxtor's new OneTouch III, Turbo Edition, which at last is sufficient to back up all of my internals in one fell swoop. This is now a very high priority in my mind since—speaking of my four-year-old—I suffered a partial drive failure not long ago and lost several audio files, including a couple recordings of my eldest when he was still learning to talk.

I am not alone. According to IDC, 26% of end-users know of data loss they've suffered. Anecdotal evidence I've collected from vendor sources indicates that nearly half of all businesses don't back up their data. My own backup strategy has evolved in an ad hoc, haphazard fashion, and that's exactly why I lost those files. I didn't have a solid plan in place and the right equipment to take myself out of the protection equation. Following my drive crash, I would have paid hundreds of dollars to wave a wand and magically make it all right again. Wouldn't and shouldn't a business pay at least that much to safeguard its records and livelihood?

Of coarse it would. But what often gets ignored is the service angle behind storage sales. Selling an external product should only be the beginning of your add-on storage solution. Despite the fact that many end-users don't understand even the most well-designed, simplest to implement storage products, if you're only selling drives, you're setting yourself up for an unwinnable price war against e-tail and retail. When you sell storage, you need to sell yourself and the expertise you can bring into the equation.

"We talk to hundreds of resellers every year," says Ed Grondahl, vice president of sales and marketing at Newisys, "and we ask them, ‘As part of that solution for that dental office or real estate firm or whatever, what kind of backup system are you installing?' A good-sized percentage don't have backup. And if they do, the people usually don't know how to use it. So the first thing is that resellers will increase the competitiveness of their solution for small businesses by having a full RAID 5. Unlike with mirroring, where you only get half of the capacity you pay for, with RAID 5, you get 1.5 of the 2X capacity because 25% is locked up for the parity bits. RAID 5 is a much more solid solution."

This is step one in establishing yourself as an expertise authority. Most people, especially in businesses, can grasp the reasoning behind network-attached storage, or NAS. You don't want a dozen users banging on a USB- or 1394-attached drive at once, bringing the host system to its knees. But explaining the benefits of RAID 5 takes a bit more effort.

RAID 5 requires at least three hard disks. RAID 0 (striping) splits data equally across two or more disks for quicker read/write times. Think of it as two or more guys with shovels moving a big pile of dirt (the file) into separate smaller files. The more little piles and workers you have, the quicker the entire mass of dirt can be moved. The trouble is that if you lose one RAID 0 drive, the entire data set is lost because you can't reconstruct the original file(s). RAID 5 solves this problem through the use of parity, which is a form of error checking and correction. Whenever a block of data is written to a RAID 5, a parity block is generated alongside it. These parity blocks get distributed across each drive in the array, and from these parity blocks the original data blocks can be reconstructed if necessary. Thus, in a three-disk RAID 5, one disk could fail, the remaining two could keep on functioning as normal (albeit at a slower speed), and when the failed drive is replaced, the parity blocks on the two surviving drives can regenerate the data necessary to recreate the original, pre-crash array.

You're probably quite familiar with the external drives from Maxtor, Seagate, Western Digital, and such. You may not be as familiar with multi-drive NAS boxes tailored to the SOHO and small business markets. You could argue that data worth protecting is worth protecting with a multi-drive system, but RAID 5-capable options here tend to be scarcer than single-drive units. Several of the units available now are based on the Intel XScale I/O processor platform, most of which use a 400 MHz version of Intel's chip. Newisys (www.newisys.com), in planning out its first NAS box, opted for the 600 MHz version of the 80219 XScale chip, figuring it could offer up to 50% better performance without elevating the overall price point. Newisys took an entire year to modify Intel's reference design and release the NA-1400, a four-bay cube enclosure based on SATA interfacing, hot-swappable drives, and two Gigabit Ethernet ports. Perhaps most distinguishing is Newisys' choice of operating system. Linux dominates in the NAS world, and two of the leading embedded distributions come from ApplianceWare and FalconStor, both of which can be remotely managed across the LAN.

"The reason we chose ApplianceWare over FalconStor is that it's an open system, and we're adding applications for customers as options," says Grondahl. "So if they want to buy a bare metal backup application, that's available. There are three or four antivirus options. If they want an ILM, similar to a Google, for searching throughout the NAS device, you can do that. Different users will want different variants in the software, so we chose an open platform with the software linkages for the product to become whatever the customer and reseller want it to be."

This is a huge differentiator and a tremendous reseller service play. The NA-1400 in a 1TB (4 x 250GB) configuration generally retails for $999, a number anyone can find and probably beat online. However, once you start customizing the unit with these software options, all standardized pricing goes out the window. The final price is literally whatever your market will bear and find fair for the value you're providing.

Other differentiators behind the NA-1400 are less dramatic if no less practical. In addition to the faster I/O processor, the box sports an 11-year MTBF rating. A Kensington lock slot in the back helps prevent theft. A locking door covering the four bays helps keep curious fingers from doing any harm to the array, particularly in a SOHO environment fraught with four-year-olds. Even the two Gigabit ports are unusual. I wouldn't dream of trying to back up hundreds of gigabytes over a 10/100 connection, but a surprisingly high number of NAS devices still use this trailing-edge interface. And the fact that there are two LAN connections means that resellers can configure the box to run on two separate networks simultaneously—a not unusual situation in small business that might, for instance, want to segregate its sales department from accounts receivable.

One of the things Newisys did with the NA-1400 that few other vendors have considered is make the power supply external to the box. This removes a considerable amount of heat from the cabinet, helping prolong drive life while also allowing for a smaller, quieter fan. The NAS box could sit on a conference room table and no one would know whether it was on or off save for the front panel's blinking blue LEDs. The other benefit of this design is that if the power supply— notoriously the weakest component in the system—fails, customers can easily swap power bricks with only minimal downtime. We've all seen the astronomical estimates on what corporate downtime costs per hour, so this is no small selling point.

"The smart reseller play is to create a revenue stream by becoming the administrator," says Grondahl. "If the small business doesn't have somebody who wants to assume the responsibility of being the administrator, the reseller can either set it, teach them how to do it, and hope they do it right or set it up, back them up, and turn it into a monthly event where the system is actually monitored to make sure that everyone is backing up properly. Because simply putting the box in the office doesn't mean that everyone is going to use it correctly, especially as staff turnover happens. And the reseller doesn't need to make a physical visit; this can all be done remotely, including the monitoring of device logs for repeatedly failing password attempts. If you can do this for 500 clients at $200 a month for 20 minutes of service, that's a pretty lucrative piece of business."

The NA-1400 is Newisys' entry-level product. The company recently acquired the "bloc" product division of Adaptec (essentially the products that weren't Snap or HBAs), so available rackmount JBOD and RAID systems span the 1U to 3U range. These have a special value in that the products feature swappable backplanes, or "building blocks," allowing resellers to migrate customers from, say, a SATA/SAS solution up into Fibre Channel by changing out the backplane rather than building a new storage system from scratch.

Newisys is hot network storage play, but there are others. The trick is to keep looking for products that lend themselves to services and return sales, not just over-the-counter box hand-offs. Storage is the one subsystem with which there's no such thing as "enough". Help your customers to recognize this, form an effective strategy, stay safe, and you'll reap the rewards.