Many IT vendors tend to focus on the mid-market to enterprise market space, yet there is a sizable SMB market where customers actively purchase physical servers on a one-at-a-time basis. This might be called (in fond memory of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels) the Lilliputian server market.
However, whatever it may lack in the size of sales, it makes up in the overall volume. And this is a market that welcomes channel partners that provide the IT value-added skill sets and capabilities that many SMB businesses simply cannot afford to support in house. Despite their small size, business continuity is still critical to SMBs.
Intel, in conjunction with InMage Software, is now delivering a well-crafted business continuity solution that channel partners can use with their SMB clients — the recently announced Intel Server Continuity Suite, which enables its channel partners to deliver business continuity to SMBs.
Business continuity is a core function that attempts to prevent — or failing that, to minimize — disruptions to business processes. All sizes of organizations have critical business processes that are vital to achieving success-oriented objectives. Degrees of disruption cover a continuum of negative impacts from minor (minimal inconvenience or productivity loss) to severe (significant economic consequences).
With the new Server Continuity Suite (SCS), Intel has delivered the primary business continuity capabilities that SMBs require. Using Intel SCS, IT administrators can manage server hardware, direct-attached storage (DAS), and backup/recovery from any place and time.
The solution cuts through potential complexity and is simple to use. Now this is often stated as necessary for SMBs, which do not have the specialized depth and breadth of IT resources available to them that larger organizations may have. Still, that is something that should also apply to larger organizations as well (who is against simplicity and lack of complexity?). The problem is that creating simple-to-use solutions is hard work (we'll see an example of that shortly in the GUI). Also, no corners can be cut in providing the solution. This is not a downsized larger solution, but one that was designed to meet the specific needs of SMBs.
The three components of SCS are server management (which Intel provides), RAID management, and data protection (which Intel has collaborated with InMage to provide).
