Selling virtualised storage to SMB VMware ESX customers

The cost and complexity of shared storage has limited the growth of VMware ESX in smaller organisations, says Mike Stolz

Stolz: Most users of active virtualisation can have their needs easily met by the average server

US-based analyst ESG claims that 59 per cent of SMBs are installing Direct Attached Storage (DAS) in their virtual server infrastructure.

We believe this typically costs a fraction of the price of external SAN and is much easier to manage.

Users deploying active virtualisation average two Terabytes of storage, an amount easily met by the internal capacity of a typical server.

If SMBs adopted cheaper, server-based storage rather than complex external systems, server virtualisation would increase, especially in organisations looking for high availability.

Until now, features such as VMotion and Dynamic Resource Scheduler (DRS) can be used for high-availability implementations.

Storage Virtual Appliances – also known as Virtual Storage Appliances (VSAs) – help VMware users adopt the internal storage features of their ESX servers.

VSAs virtualise the available disk storage as an iSCSI logical unit number, which stores data in a way that can be shared over the network.

VSAs can turn a customer's bare-bones VMware implementation into a full-featured VMware infrastructure, by delivering shared storage relatively painlessly.

This broadens the accessibility of server virtualisation to business customers.

Resellers can offer an integrated solution so the ESX user does not need to run multiple applications to manage their datastores, RAID and SAN.

This can also automate routine tasks, cutting cost and complexity.

Some vendors simply reduce the functionality of an existing enterprise product and push it into the SMB market. This does not remove complexity and SMBs may in fact need the removed functionality.

Distributors and resellers that do this, we think, will get increased growth rates, services revenue and margins.

Choosing the correct technology and partner is critical for success; the channel should not settle for the status quo. End users want to improve productivity without spending too much money.

Mike Stolz is sales and marketing vice president at StorMagic