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by William Van Winkle |
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Six months ago, we dug deep inside the world of hard drives to get a grip on the underpinnings of today's storage scene. Now, it's time to see how manufacturers are putting those drives to use and crafting value-add solutions with specific appeal to channel resellers. |
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This is a turbulent but exciting and opportunity-filled time in storage. Capacities continue to balloon as new technologies stand poised to trounce even the pace of Moore's Law. The types and utility of external drives continue to advance. SAS is poised to make its big move over SCSI in 2006, and network storage continues to grow more robust at all buyer levels. Even 2.5" drives are poised to break out into business solutions that have nothing to do with mobility. Best of all, very few of these are retail-oriented solutions. The more compelling storage gets, the more it benefits from experienced integrators who can maximize a client's technology investment and help them chart a growth path into the future. Everywhere you look in storage, there are excellent reseller niches waiting and evolving. All you need to do is figure out which make the most sense for your customer base and start rolling out the offerings. Home Storage 2.0 Our discussion of opportunities for growth in home storage should rightfully start with Maxtor. More than any other company, Maxtor has pushed the boundaries of what consumers can do with storage, particularly external storage. This began a few years ago with the Personal Storage series then hit its stride with the OneTouch family, which introduced—or at least popularized—the now-ubiquitous feature of a front panel button that launches a backup operation. (Today, of course, such buttons can usually be remapped to launch whatever application the user likes.) Ever since, competitors have been copying the OneTouch design to the point that ordinary external 3.5" drives are now commodities. Recently, Maxtor took the OneTouch family in a few different directions. We've given some air play in RAM to the OneTouch II Small Business Edition, which uses a Dantz software bundle to back up Windows server operating system and application files, including in-use databases. Most direct-attach drives are incapable of this. The SBE version is obviously more of a home office and small business play, but a lot of users will want to transport this drive between work and home applications.
The other notable OneTouch II enhancement is a FireWire 800 (1394b) variant. This was the first second-generation external FireWire drive we were aware of for the mass market. In many occasions, throughput to a direct-attach drive doesn't matter too much, but for some niches it's an increasing concern. The oft-cited example is video editing, where high throughput to a scratch disk is essential for avoiding dropped frames and errors. But the fact is that as drive capacities and job sizes increase, regardless of application, you throughput. Disk data transfers take a noticeable toll on system resources, and the sooner large transfers get done the better the user's overall computing experience. The primary uses for OneTouch drives have always been file storage and system backup. However, as anyone who has ever had a drive fail or get stolen will testify, simple on-site backup to a single drive is a far from perfect solution. This is why the selling of multiple drives can be such a compelling upsell. "To our surprise," says Stacey Lund, Maxtor vice president of marketing for branded products, "our surveys revealed that there are many people who have multiple OneTouches and are rotating them for both failsafe purposes and to have a copy of their data safely locked away off-premises. It's a poor man's off-site backup, sure, but it works. People continue to impress us with the creative ways they find to use our products." The OneTouch II took a groundbreaking sharp left turn when Maxtor released the Shared Storage drive. This made some internal tweaks to the OTII and replaced the rear ports with a 10/100 LAN interface. We had some criticisms early on with Maxtor's choice to go with Fast Ethernet over Gigabit (largely fueled by initial benchmark tests involving transfer of a 2GB file archive), but the company maintained that consumers had yet to make the Gigabit transition. Even those buying motherboards with integrated Gigabit ports were unlikely to have Gigabit switches on their LANs...and we couldn't argue with that in 2005. Had Maxtor just swapped interface types and walked away, the MSS would have been nothing more than a passing press release. However, the company took extra care with its software bundle and made sure it was ideal for the needs of newly networked consumers. "We spent a good portion of the time on the development of the MSS to create a product that literally installs in five minutes," says Lund. "You don't have to know a thing about your network. Just plug in your name, password, and let it go. You're done. And the drive icon shows up on your desktop. If you're network savvy, you know that it can take 15 to 30 minutes or even longer for a network drive to show up on the LAN in My Network Places. While that's that's going on, you don't know what's happening. So we decided to circumvent that and allow people instant access to their MSS."
This is actually only part of the story. The MSS desktop icon allows for drag-and-drop copying. Drop a folder or file on the icon and out it goes to the drive. Moreover, users can opt to let the drive automatically sort the copied files into folders predetermined by file extension type. Compared to most other network device installations we've done, the MSS stunned us with its simplicity and usefulness. But there was another twist for the MSS waiting in the wings. A few months ago, Maxtor gave the unit a firmware update (yes, customers can download this update to the original MSS for free, although you can certainly score points by doing it for them) that turned it into a Universal Plug-n-Play (UPnP) media server. Unlike most of the digital media adapter (DMA) devices on the market, the Shared Storage Plus can stream audio, photo, and video files to any compliant UPnP device, including UPnP-enabled PCs, without the assistance of a PC. For example, an owner could turn off every PC in the house and use his D-Link DSM-320 MediaLounge player to stream files straight from the Plus drive into the home theater. For convergence enthusiasts, this is a huge play: media asset backup and media serving in one affordable, portable device. Most recently, Maxtor is now ramping up the OneTouch III, Turbo Edition. This marks a complete redesign for the OneTouch family. In fact, the industrial design was done by frog, the same company that's done everything from the Windows Media Player (version 10) UI to Disney's Magic cruise ship. The sides and edges of the OneTouch III are now encased in a soft, blue-tinged rubber—excellent for preventing slippage across a desk—and the shape of the enclosure is reformed to resemble a capital I, supposedly reminiscent of a steel girder. The traditionally blue LED-lit OneTouch button now glows and blinks with white LEDs, which are oddly rare and distinguishing in the computing world. The Turbo is a stout, wide-bodied brick that shelters two hard drives for a total of 600GB or 1TB capacities today. These drives can be configured in RAID 0 or RAID 1 via Maxtor's habitually painless bundled software, and all three interfaces (USB 2.0, 1394a, and 1394b) are present. What about a non-Turbo OneTouch III? We actually had the chance to play with a prototype 300GB unit. The drive is styled very similarly to the Turbo, only slimmer for a single-drive configuration. We were very impressed with the unit's solid yet surprisingly light design and shock-resistant mountings. That said, Maxtor has yet to announce a release date for the standard OneTouch III, perhaps in order to let the Turbo secure its place at the top of the external drive world in order to create pull for the more mainstream version. Another likely explanation is to keep competition away from existing OneTouch II drives already on store shelves until after the holidays. "There is certainly margin opportunity with our products because the public perception is that we're an optimal solution," says Lund, "and people are willing to pay more for that. If you want to sell a cheap product, you're not going to make much margin." Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that you won't make as much margin. Occasionally, you can still make decent upsell scores in storage without doing anything elaborate. A good example would be the SimpleTOUCH HD Kit from ADS Technology (www.adstech.com). This is a simple enclosure with a $59 MSRP that turns a parallel ATA drive into an external USB 2.0 drive. (The enclosure also comes with Intech's SpeedTools disk utilities and backup software, which normally sells for $90.) For users who are upgrading their storage and have run out of internal bays, a value-add enclosure like ADS's means only a few minutes of tech time for an easy margin bump. USB enclosures are pretty standard issue, though, even a nice unit like the SimpleTOUCH. More provocative is ADS's deceptively bland NAS Drive Kit. At a list price of $129, you might just mistake this for another high-end enclosure, but it's much more. You start by mounting in a parallel ATA drive, but the you connect it to the LAN via a 10/100 port. If you feel you already know the rest of the story—yes, it's a NAS device like the Shared Storage—hold on.
First off, the NAS Drive Kit turns the hard drive into an FTP server so users and their associates can access files from anywhere in the world. Next, the drive can also work as a Web server. For those hosting small personal or business sites, this is a tremendous feature. But perhaps most intriguing for consumers is the integrated BitTorrent client. If you've been in a cave since the advent of online file sharing, BitTorrent is one of the most popular ways to swap large (as in movie-sized) files over the Internet, but less popular files—even copyrighted ones—can take a very long time to download. We've had sessions take over three days for one file, and you don't want to break a download because of system resetting. The NAS Drive Kit can perform these downloads, leaving the user free to shut down PCs at will. Products like the NAS Drive Kit are a stellar upsell because not only do they offer a lot of value at an affordable price point but they give you an opportunity to step in and charge for setup and an hour or two of education. Between SOHO and Small Biz The small office/home office space obviously has a lot of cross-over with the consumer world, and the needs of many high-end consumers surpass those of many small businesses. Consider portable storage. Whereas an "external hard drive" almost always uses a 3.5" internal drive, a "portable hard drive" is generally based on 2.5" drive. Are portable hard drives meant for consumers ferrying videos and MP3 archives to their friends' houses or road warriors transporting presentations and databases between the home office and remote customer sites? Naturally, the answer is both. Seagate has done a better job than most in addressing this mobile segment with its 2.5"-based Portable Hard Drives, due to reach 120GB in January, and its 1.0"-based Pocket Drives, today topping out at 5GB and not much larger in diameter than a silver dollar. Any reseller offering whitebooks would do well to stock such drives as accessories. Even in our own business travels, we've found that such drives let us take along all the business and entertainment files we could want without the burden of stuffing our notebook drives to the point of failure. Speaking of which, Seagate has also made major inroads in the mobile market with its Momentus line of 2.5" hard drives. Thus far, Momentus has been something of a me-too line, seeming to keep pace with Hitachi's Travelstar lineup. Seagate's move to a five-year warranty was a great harbinger, but heading into 2006, Seagate may well come into its own with two significant advances: FDE and perpendicular recording.
FDE stands for "full disc encryption". In a nutshell, each FDE drive incorporates a chip that performs 3DES encryption and decryption on all read and write operations. Years ago, DES (Data Encryption Standard), with its 56-bit key technology, was the de facto encryption method in computing, but processing power advances have left it highly vulnerable to brute force attacks. A triple-stage DES variant called 3DES took its place, and this has proven uncrackable up to present, although it is giving way to the even more secure AES (Advanced Encryption Standard), which Seagate will adopt in its subsequent generation FDE drives. Each FDE drive ships with a tag attached to it displaying the drive's Security ID (SID) code, which correlates to its serial number and is kept on file at Seagate. The encryption kicks into gear when the user installs the FDE software that ships with the drive and establishes a locking password. "Your network login is very secure," says Joni Clark, Seagate's product marketing manager for personal computing. "But what happens if you're on the plane and forget your laptop? I had a manager who once left his laptop on the plane from Denver to San Jose, which is a no-no, because that's the route that all hard drive manufacturers fly. All his road maps were on there for anyone to see because he no longer had the security of the network keeping things nice and tight. FDE resides on the drive and encrypts everything directly. If you don't know the password and violate it, you're completely locked out of the drive. There's no way to get in there and steal those files." Drive users are given three chances to enter the password. Upon the third failure, the drive shuts down and can only be unlocked with the Security ID code, which only exists with the proper owner and at Seagate.
The Momentus 5400 FDE is, of course, a 5,400 RPM drive. Expect there to be a slight price premium over standard Momentus 5400 models, but also rest assured that there is no performance hit caused by the encryption/decryption because those processes are entirely handled by the onboard chip, not computed in software. The FDE series should be a huge value-add to any customer handling sensitive data on the road. Migrating FDE to the 3.5" line seems like a no-brainer, but until it happens, resellers may want to consider wrapping USB enclosures around the 2.5" drives and marketing them as security-minded desktop accessory storage solutions. 3DES is stronger than the 128-bit encryption built into the Microsoft Encryption Pack. The EFS used in Windows XP Professional can utilize 3DES, but Seagate's implementation is simpler and much more easily applied. For those less concerned with security and capacity, take heart. The age of perpendicular recording is just around the calendar corner. For those who might have missed it previously, nearly all hard drives up to present have used longitudinal recording, wherein the magnetic particles on a disk's surface are laid flat against the platter and arranged end to end. Longitudinal recording maxes out at roughly 250 Gbit/sq. inch. Beyond this, data randomly corrupts during reading or writing. With perpendicular writing, the magnetic bits are stood on end, perpendicular to the platter, allowing for areal densities approximately ten times that of longitudinal recording. Seagate will release its debut perpendicular drive in the first quarter of 2006 in the form of a 160GB Momentus. According to Clark, the 2.5" form factor made more sense because mobile users increasingly need and expect similar capacities to desktop drives, so there is more demand anticipated in the mobile space. The company is playing it a little more conservatively than perhaps necessary, citing only a 5X expected gain over longitudinal. Still, this will eventually put us into 5TB desktop drives within a decade. Hitachi and others have also been working on perpendicular for some time, but whichever company manages to hit the new capacities first should have a significant value-add lead over the competition. Another strong SOHO-to-SMB play emerging from Seagate in the coming quarter is eSATA, or external SATA. Unlike early attempts to extend standard SATA onto a PC backplane, eSATA is a redesigned connection that uses longer plug depth and greater shielding to protect data and enable external cable lengths of two meters, twice that of internal SATA, while still preserving the 1.5 Gbps or 3.0 Gbps data rates between the drives and controllers. Seagate will be among the first drive manufacturers to ship an eSATA drive, and it will do so with an optional bundle featuring a Netcell-based, 3-port eSATA add-in controller. If you haven't checked out Netcell's technology yet, you're missing something big. Deceptively simple but surprisingly diverse in its range of applications, Netcell is a fabless chip company that makes storage processors. The company's two main board partners are XFX and PNY, and cards presently come in 3- and 5-port versions. LSI, Adaptec, and others make RAID adapters, but Netcell has the patent on hardware emulation of an IDE controller on a host bus, which means you don't need to have drivers when you install the card because it simply emulates an IDE controller courtesy of the drivers already built into the operating system.
This is important for two reasons. First, not having to mess with drivers makes installation much quicker and cleaner, and that's always a productivity booster in the back room. Second, it used to be that if you had a failure in a boot RAID, one of the first things that would happen is Windows would ask for your floppy with the RAID drivers, just like what happened during Windows installation. However, most systems now ship without floppy drives, yet a large number of motherboards lack the BIOS options necessary to make a USB flash drive emulate a floppy diskette, all of which means you're stuck. But with Netcell, since the only driver you need is the embedded IDE driver, RAID repair proceeds without a hitch. ...more |
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