Say the words “home office” and “EMC” in the same sentence, and something just doesn’t seem right, does it? But the storage titan, along with some other well-known brethren in the industry, is targeting the small office-home office (SOHO) market with a vengeance, though each are navigating a different route to what they all hope will be a revenue
Mecca.
EMC’s vessel is LifeLine OEM Software, which promises to help small
home office users centralize, organize and secure digital files and anything from Excel payroll documents to family photos and everything in-between.
What’s unique is that while EMC is aiming at the SOHO user, it’s not a
direct sell. Instead, the vendor’s working with SOHO device
manufacturers/partners such as Intel, which just pushed out the
Intel Entry Storage System SS4200-E this week at CES featuring the
Lifeline application.
According to an EMC spokesperson, the OEM partner model gives EMC
“the broadest technology portfolio from which to create offerings for
these markets.”
Iomega has also jumped on the Lifeline bandwagon with CEO
Jonathan Huberman stating in a release that his company is partnering
with EMC on a new line of Iomega-branded network storage products for
the consumer and SMB market.
The LifeLine software is browser-based and managed through game
consoles as well as desktops. It supports Windows and Macintosh and
provides data protection capabilities including RAID and EMC’s
Retrospect backup software. The application even takes in “greening”
concerns as the built-in disk drive offers up a spin-down function.
But it’s not just all about preserving family memories and cherished
video clips. The Lifeline product also offers advanced file sharing,
data management and data protection features. For example, users can
search inside file content using keywords and there’s even a printer
server.
EMC, however, isn’t alone in vying what could be a lucrative low-end
storage market. This past September, Dell debuted its MD3000i as a cost-effective
alternative to Fibre Channel storage options. The device runs on iSCSI
over an Ethernet network. In December Dell gobbled up iSCSI specialist
EqualLogic as well as UK-based storage consultancy The Networked Storage
Company (TNWSC).
Late last year IBM debuted a first entry-level storage product, The
System Storage DS4200 Express, aimed at SMBs with less than 1,000
employees, and announced a partnership with Network Appliance to produce
systems built on the partner’s unified and open network-attached storage
and iSCSI/IP SAN products.
Online storage providers are also kicking down SMB doors these days,
offering efficient, less-IT intensive alternatives to running network
attached options. As one analyst explained in a recent InternetNews.com
article,
“Online backup services are particularly attractive to the SMB market,
as this meets some of their unique needs.”
The scrabble to grab big chunks of the SOHO storage pie won’t be
dying down anytime soon, given that SOHOs continue to grow in numbers
with nearly 35 million home office households up and operating in 2005
according to an IDC research report. No wonder EMC (and likely every
other vendor in play) views it, and the consumer storage market, as
“growth opportunities for the future.”
