Netgear pushes backup/DR hardware for SMB resellers

ReadyData 5200 claimed to give SMBs enterprise level scalability and redundancy at lower cost

By Simon Eskow, Auckland | Monday, 23 July 2012
Consumer and business storage provider Netgear rolled out its latest SMB-targeted ReadyData products on July 11.

The company, which focuses on SMBs with up to 500 seats for its commercial business products, says trends in virtualisation and BYOD are affecting companies of all sizes, playing into their target customer market.

“Fundamentally it doesn’t matter if you’re an enterprise or an SMB,” says Netgear MD for ANZ Ryan Parker. “They all have the same problems. If you’re an enterprise you have an IT budget to throw at it to solve the problem because big storage capacity comes with complexity and cost. But SMBs don’t have the big IT budget to spend, so you’re looking for the most reliable, least expensive product to deploy.”

The 5200 series starts out as a two-IU rack-mountable unit with 12 drives that can be scaled-up to 36 terabytes of data, combining SATA and SSD device performance into single volumes.

The company says the value proposition to resellers and their customers is its affordability, coming in at around $10,000.

“It scales beyond the average need of the SMB, which is insurance for them to know if they do spend the money they will get longevity out of the hardware with the instant expansion,” Parker says.

The company, which distributes through Ingram Micro, Synnex and Exeed, demonstrated the system to some resellers on the launch day.

Netgear representatives say that the enticement to their partners is the instant scalability of machines, inline daily deduping and “unlimited snapshots” for disaster recovery, among other features.

“This is ideal for our partners providing hosted or cloud based services to their customers,” Parker says. “In a virtualised environment, unified storage is a must. How do SMBs do hourly snapshots and replicate the data and send snapshots to a second location? This gives SMBs the ability to have disaster recovery where the secondary site can be seconds behind and it’s ready to go.

This is the sort of capability that the enterprise companies have expected from their partners and vendors, but that SMBs just didn’t have the money to spend on a complex solutions.”

Parker says the company rolled out the 5200 as a response to reseller demand. Its resellers, he says, either focus on DR, or backup, or virtualisation, but the solution is supposed to be able to entice all three.

“They’re excited they can have an easier conversation with their customers,” he says. “They’ll have their problems to solve and they’ll come up with their own solutions using this.”

Netgear’s New Zealand country manager, Kent Dapiere says the positive response they’ve seen so far has come from a mix of partners.

“There are resellers focused on managed services, and those focused on traditional IT hardware onsite and doing offsite backup,” he said. “There’s definitely a mixture of both.”

However Netgear says it has a relatively low exposure in the SMB space than their consumer products enjoy.
Parker says Netgear sees the 5200’s monitoring capability as a further incentive to allow for virtual provisioning for resellers hosting or managing customers.

“It has great implications for backup and DR, and it’s easy to use,” he says. “And it’s easy for our resellers to deploy.”