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By William Van Winkle |
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Complacency can kill. Just when you think you've mastered all aspects of a product category, you look up one day and find your competition making a fortune on products and services wholly absent from your own offerings. Even worse, they might be things you'd heard of but passed over for this reason or that, only to find later that they've become the new "it" items. Everybody sells storage. In the consumer and small business spaces, this means internal drives, USB and FireWire externals, and a small but growing crop of NAS boxes. We've all heard the news, got the T-shirts, and life went on. But hold tight. Storage is a rapidly evolving field, and the product lineups that you might have grown used to taking for granted may in fact hold some hidden gems. We've had a lot of great stuff cycle through our offices recently, and vendors are tearing their hair out wanting to get the channel more aware of some of the great opportunities now before them. We tagged some of the best and brightest to suggest as leading value-adds for your clients. Media Box Drives The number one pitch on hard drives has always been and remains capacity. With the present shift to perpendicular recording methods, we're seeing unprecedented capacities. In the 3.5" desktop field, Seagate recently nailed the 750GB mark with its Barracuda 7200.10. Interestingly, though, some insiders don't see absolute capacity having the priority on desktops that it used to. "I don't foresee a lot of people out there putting a 750GB drive in their desktops at this point in time," says Seagate's Jennifer Bradfield, director, Americas channel marketing. "For external storage, expanded storage, and any kind of RAIDed application or a JBOD, they're looking for capacity. How many spindles can you turn, and how little power can you consume? That's where the 750GB will play. Certainly, there will be desktop niches—workstations for video editing and other prosumer tasks." Nevertheless, there are plenty of other headliners in the high-capacity space worth reseller notice. Alongside the 7,200 RPM Barracuda, Seagate also set loose the world's first 15,000 RPM perpendicular drive, the 300GB Cheetah 15K.5, and a few months earlier the company was first to market with a perpendicular laptop drive, the 160GB Momentus 5300.3. Toshiba was actually the first to deliver a perpendicular drive on 1.8" media last year, and in June Toshiba announced a 200GB 2.5" drive with August availability. Meanwhile, Hitachi is promising a 1.0TB desktop drive in 2007 as well as a mind-blowing 20GB Microdrive. While the highest capacity drives usually carry a cost-per-gigabyte premium, they also offer the prospect of fewer total drives and thus simpler data management, a facet of storage resellers should always take care to emphasize to clients.
Hitachi also recently joined the ranks of drive manufacturers targeting streaming multimedia with a new family of 3.5" drives called CinemaStar. Available in PATA or 3 Gbps SATA with capacities up to 500GB, the CinemaStar targets consumer electronics devices, especially set-top boxes. The drives feature quieter acoustics, lower power consumption, and higher temperature thresholds for working in ultra-cramped enclosures that in turn may be sealed inside of home theater cabinets. More importantly, such drives are optimized for digital media streaming because they often disable the time-consuming bit-level error checking that normally helps assure absolute data integrity in conventional applications. With digital media, you don't care if there's an inaudible pop or one pixel in a frame is miscolored. The object is to make sure that high-def data keeps streaming no matter what. Perhaps this is why Hitachi sought to gently dissuade us when we inquired about the CinemaStar for home theater PCs. "CinemaStar is optimized for digital video, so it's really targeted at DVRs and set-top boxes," company reps emphasized. "Because media center PCs combine different types of data, we would recommend the Deskstar line for this purpose." Certainly, for mixed applications, a traditional drive would be best. But some HTPC buyers simply want to record and play back media, and unerring transfers are paramount. Consider the likes of Hitachi's CinamaStar, Seagate's DB35, and similar units for such dedicated systems, and give them a fair shake in your shop. External Innovations USB and FireWire drives look to be mainstays for a long time to come. The only problem with them is that they're strong retail sellers, which makes being competitive through distribution more difficult. The place where resellers might normally recoup some leverage—product setup and usage education—is minimized because Seagate, Maxtor, and Western Digital have all done exemplary jobs of making their backup-focused externals idiot-proof. This is why products such as the Pushbutton External, OneTouch III, and My Book, despite their many great attributes, are essentially clones in different clothes. Still, there are some exciting developments here. Maxtor's OneTouch III, Turbo Edition leads the charge in dual-drive externals offering RAID 0 or 1 options. Again, Maxtor's software is gloriously friendly, and we love how it makes quick work of changing from mirroring to striping configurations or vice versa, but there remains a solid spot for resellers to slip in when customers want to change their RAID type. After all, the drive needs to be reformatted, and unless the user has an equivalent amount of spare capacity laying around (up to 1TB presently), he's going to need some help getting the drive's contents migrated to the new RAID configuration. (Stray note: Maxtor recently entered into the mobile backup space with the 2.5"-based OneTouch III, Mini Edition. True, 2.5" drives are made to take a greater pounding than their desktop counterparts, but we can't help but wonder how long it will be until someone comes up with something like a dual-drive Mini. The one shortcoming of the Turbo is its formidable size and weight, and a dual-drive Mini would remedy this, albeit with a sizable hit to overall capacity.)
One technology we've been anxiously anticipating is eSATA, which is essentially 3 Gbps SATA recrafted into an external port. Not many motherboards yet come with eSATA built on (ASUS' higher-end SKUs are a notable exception), so Seagate decided to bundle a two-port PCI adapter with its 300GB and 500GB eSATA External models. The substantially faster throughput of eSATA over even 1394b opens up several new opportunities. Not only can you stack eSATA drives, but you can also put them in RAIDs without taking a massive performance hit from the external data interface. For network-attached storage (NAS) devices, eSATA has sufficient throughput to enable add-on drives for array spanning, not just the addition of another network volume as is done with today's USB drives. And when it comes to adding storage to home media servers, there's no question that eSATA drives will offer better performance for concurrent HD media streams than USB or FireWire.
In the external drive space, you're always going to have to compete aggressively against retail. But one way you can pick up converts is with smarter messaging and the promotion of smarter backup strategies. "We all know that we do a bad job of backing up our data," says Seagate's Bradfield. "The system builder is in a unique position to make it easy for his customers to have an automated backup solution. I personally have a Seagate Portable Hard Drive on my laptop, and I have it set to remind me once a week that I haven't done my backup. And honestly, this is a first for me. I've never had a backup before. Seagate always backed me up to the server. But the more I started traveling and working offline, it became more important for me not to lose all that work that I spent hours on an airplane putting together." No doubt, plenty of your corporate accounts have users just like Bradfield who are still stuck with old habits that don't mesh well with the transition to being a road warrior or working from home. These and consumers buying new systems are likely your best candidates for external and portable storage products. Disaster preparation has almost become an industry cliche since Hurricane Katrina, but the need for it remains as imperative as ever. New Ground on the Network For us, the most exciting space in storage today is NAS. Our pet peeve in the SOHO/small biz NAS world has been 10/100 ports owing to their hellishly slow transfer rates, but at last vendors all seem to have figured out that motherboards are (and have been for years) shipping with Gigabit Ethernet ports. So one small point to bring to customers is that if they've held off on NAS because of bandwidth concerns, they can now rest easy...assuming you've done the right thing and empowered them with Gigabit Ethernet LAN switches.
By the time you read this, Maxtor's Shared Storage II should be in distribution. Like the preceding Shared Storage Plus, the II is both a backup solution as well as a UPnP AV media server. Styling has changed to fit the rubberized OneTouch III family, and, like the OTIII Turbo, the new Shared Storage features two 500GB drives, configurable in RAID 0 or 1. So far, this sounds a lot like other NAS options, but Maxtor adds its own ingenuity in the software. The drive sports two USB ports for additional drive storage, but the bundled backup application gives users the option of backing up the RAID to the attached drive for taking off-site. This is a very smart move sure to appeal to people in the habit of rotating backup drives. Now they can keep doing rotations but without the lower cost of a USB device rather than multiple NAS boxes. Back on the consumer side, we're still stumped as to why Seagate isn't drawing legions of fans to its revamped Mirra Sync and Share Personal Server. No doubt, the problem is the same faced by Maxtor's new Fusion drive: too much radically new (and cool!) functionality to be taken in with 10 seconds of bullet points. These products require end-user education, and that's why they're great reseller plays. On the outside, the Mirra is a backup and restore box, and in typical Seagate fashion it does this job very well. But as is increasingly common in this space, the difference between brilliance and mediocrity is in the software. Seagate doesn't just offer an all-or-nothing default backup upon installation. One option is for Recommended Backups, which nominates folders such as My Documents and the deeply buried location for users' Outlook PST files. Plenty of backup drives store historical versions, but Seagate makes browsing and undeleting these much simpler than any other implementation we've seen.
With a free account at Mirra.com, users can get protected access to their shared folders in a much friendlier interface than the usual FTP tree, and that goes for both downloading and uploading. Better still, users can share folders with others on a permissions basis either by adding them in the Mirra UI or inviting them through email. This is a really slick feature sure to appeal to those who share photos with extended family or corporate users who share digital assets with remote workgroup members. Owners can synchronize folders across multiple PCs, and the device can be set to back up those synchronizations continuously rather than on a sporadic schedule. Without question, Mirra is the slickest SOHO-level network appliance we've seen yet, and it deserves a much larger audience.
Moving more into the corporate space, you begin to see the proliferation of multi-drive enclosures, such as Buffalo's TeraStation and Iomega's 200D series. But one new entrant that may not have fallen on your radar yet is Intel's SS4000-E, a hot-swappable, four-drive SATA enclosure with dual Gigabit ports (for fail-over, not aggregation), two USB ports for additional storage volumes, a 400 MHz XScale processor, and a plain but comprehensive GUI interface. Many readers may not even know that Intel is now in the finished storage products arena. "Around Q4 of last year, we gathered all the different storage pieces from throughout the company and put them under one umbrella called the Intel Storage Group," explains Seth Bobroff, director of marketing programs, Intel storage group. "Making a group out of that has resonated really well with our server and business clients. It's a pretty big deal for us. In the channel—and so far our network storage products are channel-only—the Intel brand carries a certain amount of equity in terms of support. People know that about our processors and motherboards, and that gets transferred over to our storage products, as well." Intel offers several advantages here, some of which are more obvious than others. Dealer pricing on the enclosure runs about $549 with no drives, allowing you to sell a 1.0TB solution for under $900, which is very competitive with units offering significantly less functionality. In addition to Intel support, buyers get a three-year enclosure warranty. Intel dispenses with having a front panel door and makes all four drives hot-swappable on easy slide-out carriers. We tried this hands-on in our office. As soon as a drive is disengaged, Intel's software pops up a window showing the old and new configuration status but does not interrupt drive functioning provided an appropriate RAID level was configured. (RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10 are supported.) Plug a new drive in and the subsystem goes about the work of array rebuilding in the background. There's a slight drive performance hit while this is happening, but not much. In fact, you can do this removal and rebuild procedure while streaming a video and never see a hiccup during playback. This capability is not lost on Intel, which is already dropping hints that there will be some special functionality between its NAS box and a forthcoming Viiv platform version, although the company won't let loose with even vague details yet. The SS4000-E lets users start with one drive and scale up to four as they see fit, although keep in mind that backups and restores will be needed as RAID levels change. Whereas many NAS devices simply serve as remote group storage, the SS4000-E doubles as a bona fide backup solution outfitted with backup/restore software and bare metal backup capabilities, which will come as welcome news to small offices in the habit of misplacing their software discs. With Active Directory support, available in the upcoming software update, managing the SS4000-E across groups within an organization will also become markedly more efficient. The unit features impressive airflow and temperature controls, and while not silent, the box is suitably quiet for living room and conference room use. The number of small businesses without a decent backup and group storage solution in place is staggering. Intel's SS4000-E is perhaps the most robust, flexible, and channel-friendly solution we've seen for this segment yet. But as we've covered above, there are still plenty of storage opportunities in the consumer world, whether you're looking at LAN-based, local attached, or internal drive needs. Lucrative niches abound. Just pick the right value-add hot plays for your audience and be surprised at how easy it is not to let storage be a no-profit commodity. |
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