The Hidden NAS Opportunity w/ Oliver Kaven

Most solution providers who resell storage already know that margins on storage hardware are getting smaller and that they need to supplement their sales by offering additional services to their clients. If you are one of these resellers, you have probably also realized that there is a trend among your small and midsize business clients to move from direct-attached storage (DAS) to network-attached storage (NAS).

There are good reasons for the change. Especially for SMBs, NAS devices are a simple and flexible way to deploy storage solutions. Easily sharing data with many client PCs or servers using one centralized storage device is attractive to many businesses. And without the need for a fully equipped file server or multiple file servers, NAS enables you to consolidate your storage infrastructure and thereby simplify the overall management of your database and file-system environment—another good reason to choose NAS over DAS.

An SMB NAS solution is also one of the few platforms that provide you, the solution provider, with a tremendous opportunity to grow your business by solving specific challenges that your clients are facing, including increasingly strict regulatory compliance requirements, flexibility to meet growing capacity demands, and multiprotocol support. But solving these particular business challenges is only the tip of the iceberg. Other applications are now emerging.

Where solutions are concerned, you have to think outside the box (of hard disks), literally. Web-based remote access to data, automatic remote backup over a wide area network (WAN) link, hot failover, or the ability to tie seamlessly into a network-enabled security camera system are examples of solutions you may be looking for, and NAS is the ideal platform to address many of these challenges.

Hardware manufacturers have also identified the opportunity to extend their existing NAS product lines and sales by offering targeted features and solutions that will be of benefit both to you as a VAR partner and to your customers.

For example, a fully embedded Web access solution enables your customers to use their Web browsers to easily access or upload data to their NAS storage devices while they are on the road or away from the office. The distributed file system, or DFS, feature allows you to connect several of your clients’ distributed shared folders into one DFS namespace. To make this ongoing development process as successful as possible, however, storage vendors must routinely interview their VAR partners and work with them to identify and develop the most sought-after solutions.

Identifying these opportunities in your customers’ infrastructure is not only your responsibility, but it is also a good strategy if you want to expand your storage sales and service portfolio. Offering matching, targeted solutions that will differentiate you as a leader in your market is another important step, and NAS is the ideal platform on which to build. The addition of effective, innovative solutions to your mix of offerings has the added benefit of deepening your trusted adviser relationship with your existing clients.

OLIVER KAVEN is the senior product manager for Buffalo Technology (USA) Inc., an Austin, Texas-based designer, developer, and manufacturer of wired and wireless networking, storage, multimedia, and memory solutions for the home and small businesses. Before joining Buffalo Technology, Kaven was the lead analyst for SMB Products and Network Infrastructure

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