For small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs), the rapid shift of today’s digital landscape has never been more challenging.
But as technology continues to push forward rapidly, so must the businesses using it. Today, companies need to consistently keep up with change or risk no longer being able to provide the services needed to remain relevant in this hyper-competitive world – an issue small businesses are particularly sensitive to. It can, quite literally, be a matter of life or death for an SMB.
And it’s not like the IT departments in SMBs aren’t aware of the problem. According to Gartner forecasts, the global spend on IT is projected to total $4.7 trillion across sectors in 2023 alone – an increase of 4.3% from the previous year. With this in mind, it’s easy to understand how essential digital transformation is to the survival of the SMB, underscoring the need to adopt IT solutions, integrate systems, and streamline processes to remain competitive.
There are a plethora of options on the market, with each solution promising to be the magic fix for problems ranging from unplanned downtime, disconnected applications and systems, and disruptions to company processes. But unfortunately, for small and mid-sized businesses, finding the “right” data storage solution for a particular need or use case can be a challenge in itself.
It begs the question: how is it that so many businesses today are still running into a number of IT challenges, particularly around data processing and data storage with their existing solutions? And can anything be done to overcome these issues?
Space Constraints and Small Office Sizes
For SMBs operating in small offices and spaces, a common issue is finding a solution that doesn’t require large amounts of floor space. Many widely-used data storage solutions like physical SANs aren’t made with smaller environments in mind and often prove impractical.
Embracing the power of lightweight IT solutions like virtual SANs as an alternative can offer users a host of advantages over their physical counterparts. Flexible and scalable, virtual SANs provide organizations the freedom to effortlessly expand their storage capabilities, without the hassle of extra hardware.
Able to be deployed on commodity x86 servers, virtual SANs offer users the best of both worlds, boasting the same benefits as a physical SAN like maximizing resource utilization, all while eliminating the associated costs, complexity, and space requirements.
Virtual SANs can be used with edge-specific hardware like the HPE ProLiant Gen 10 Plus and Lenovo ThinkSystem SE350, taking care of the processing, management, and protection of enterprise data. Additionally, they easily integrate into tight, distributed locations, all without compromising the functionality found in physical SAN solutions.
Lower Budgets
Finding that sweet spot between data storage that’s robust enough to tolerate a variety of operating environments, and doesn’t create massive dents in department wallets like many over-spec’d solutions on the market can seem like an impossibility. This is particularly true where limited budgets for IT investments are the reality.
Datacenter-class solution costs are typically high and out of the question for many that fit this demographic. They are over-provisioned for the majority of use cases, and have vendor lock-ins that restrict users to specific and restrictive system requirements.
Cloud computing solutions can solve these issues in part for those in areas where networking and latency aren’t an issue. But for those operating in harsher computing environments, have large volumes of data needing to be stored, or need to store big data for long periods of time, these costs can quickly begin to escalate once again.
In these circumstances, leveraging a lightweight virtualized storage solution that can run on any standard x86 servers, and is flexible to allow the SMB to configure as they wish, will deliver the necessary functionality for a fraction of the price. Some solutions even promise the high availability of enterprise apps and systems with as few as two server nodes.
Lack of Resources
Not all SMBs have dedicated in-house teams of IT personnel. In fact, it’s not at all uncommon to find those with just one or two IT staff to hand, or even none at all.
A limitation such as this poses challenges to the effective management and maintenance of any IT solution – many data storage products have a multitude of complex features and concepts that are beyond the comprehension of anyone outside the industry. Naturally, this can make it extremely difficult to tell the difference between a good IT investment which will help the organization in question reach its digital transformation goals, and a purchase that will only drain its resources further down the line.
Therefore, SMBs require solutions that can be deployed extremely easily and then forgotten about, running in the background with minimal input. When input is required, it can be performed by any IT professional, such as the business’ sole IT manager, rather than requiring a product expert with years of specific training on one solution. Ease of deployment and management is critical for SMBs and should be high on the priority list.
Furthermore, leveraging the expertise of a value-added reseller or partner to advise and assist with acquiring and configuring a solution is a key element of modern-day IT procurement for SMBs. Ensuring that a partner is competent, reliable and trustworthy can help overcome any limitations that a small or medium-sized business may face with its own IT personnel.
Solving common SMB-related challenges with StorMagic SvSAN
Purchasing, deploying, and managing data storage IT solutions in the datacenter, the cloud, and at the network edge are some of the most common issues small to mid-sized businesses face. However, the availability of cost-effective and compact data storage solutions, the option to outsource IT management, and the ability to leverage cloud services, can empower smaller businesses and help them better overcome these hurdles.
With the majority now embracing digital transformation, future-proofing their business, and leveraging the growth of IT endpoints, in addition to the rise in tailored offerings that cater to a variety of company sizes and use cases, SMBs can position themselves for success in the evolving landscape of IT at the network edge.
One such solution that addresses the common IT challenges SMBs face is StorMagic SvSAN. A ‘set and forget’ solution, StorMagic SvSAN ensures ease of use for SMBs while providing high availability and security for enterprise services and applications using just two nodes – so the businesses using it can deploy it at multiple sites and environments effortlessly.
Flexible in nature, SvSAN works on both virtual machines (VMs) and containers and is capable of being run on any x86 server. The solution supports all types of storage and accommodates diverse application environments. Additionally, it eliminates the need for a physical SAN, and is able to work on both new and existing hypervisors including VMware, vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Linux KVM, providing users with a cost-effective option that fits even the tightest of department budgets.
Thousands of companies have been able to transform their IT infrastructure into robust, lightweight environments using StorMagic SvSAN. Existing users have benefitted consistently from data redundancy and protection, and dramatically reduced costs by converging compute and storage into a commodity server footprint.
But don’t just take our word for it. Check out what our customers have to say about us on our case studies page, or jump on a call with one of the team for a full demo of SvSAN.
