Which DAS vendors are positioning their offerings to fit the SMB market?
Most vendors have done some sort of adjustment with their product line, either creating entirely new product lines or retrofitting their products for the SMB space. Those vendors include Dell Inc., IBM Corp., EMC Corp., Hewlett-Packard (HP) Co., Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) Ltd., LSI Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc., LeftHand and Microsoft Corp. I would say almost every vendor out there is in some shape or form is catering to the SMB in the DAS space. Are there any best practices for selecting a DAS system in an SMB environment? The key one is to keep in mind is what you’re going to use that storage for. Take a step back and see if it makes sense to have all of your storage in some form of a network (NAS, NFS, CIFS, iSCSI or Fibre Channel) and, if so, why? Is it for boosting utilization sharing or is it because someone told you that’s the best way to do it? You can go the other way and look at the business value of having some DAS on a server. Is it for a localized boost, a localized scratch
