Storage Goes Home

The game of How low can you go?” in storage networking keeps reaching new depths. Entry-level SAN and NAS systems aimed at SMBs are no longer the low end. Now we’re seeing networked storage for home users.

New SAN software from DataCore Software Corp. and a partnership built around Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) Linksys routers and Maxtor Corp. (NYSE: MXO)drives, both launched this week, take the concept of NAS and SAN for the masses down to new levels.

By plugging a USB drive into the Linksys wired or wireless routers, any user on a home network can access the drive. The router works with any hard drive, but Linksys ships with Maxtor file management software to facilitate the use of Maxtor drives. Linksys and Maxtor pitch the technology as a mini-NAS that provides 250 Gbytes of storage for $450 -- $99 for the router and $350 for the drive. Users can daisy chain drives for more storage.

“The SMB products you hear about are really for medium-sized businesses,” says Stephen DiFranco, Maxtor’s VP of marketing. “There’s nothing that really addresses the small business and home market. This requires no IT expertise.”

Datacore's SANmelody Lite, a scaled down version of SANmelody for SMBs, runs on PC servers and lets users grab additional capacity from any other hard drive on the network. DataCore CEO George Teixeira says the product turns a server with a couple of SATA drives and Ethernet connection into a mini-iSCSI SAN.He says the $200 software product targets small businesses, but he uses the term broadly. “You can even get into home networking with this. Anybody can taste this technology and experience an iSCSI SAN.”DataCore’s goal is to reel in lower-end users and eventually get them to upgrade to beefier SANmelody products as the network grows.

Market analyst In-Stat/MDR forecasts the worldwide home networking equipment market to grow from $8.3 billion this year to $17.1 billion by 2008. In-Stat's projection includes entertainment equipment as well as home routers, storage, wireless LANs, and other LAN interfaces.

“There probably won’t be a lot of NAS in the home,” In-Stat analyst Mike Wolf says. “We forecast about 10 percent to 15 percent of home networks will have some sort of networked storage but it will take a few years.”

Doing his own math, Maxtor's DiFranco figures close to 2 million home offices in the U.S. alone, plus about 40 million homes with broadband access, are candidates for small-fry networks. He thinks home storage networks will eventually turn into entertainment hubs, but will start off for business purposes. He expects wireless to fuel home business use.

“This is the beginning of the next phase of getting storage and printers to network wirelessly,” he says.The concept of home storage networking isn't new. Charles Stevens, Corporate VP of Microsoft Corp.’s (Nasdaq: MSFT) Enterprise Storage Division, told us in a January interview:

“We see NAS growing in the low-end $400 to $5,000 space, with help from low-cost disks and good software for home offices and SMB.”

In recent months, we’ve also seen:

— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch