Quoting INQ7

Information technology giant IBM said small to medium scale businesses (SMBs) in Asia-Pacific will be a major driver for storage virtualization adoption, compared to larger enterprise counterparts.

Speaking to Asian reporters during the IBM Asia Pacific Storage Summit in Macau, IBM Vice President for Worldwide Storage Systems Sales Elly Keinan said due to the size of SMBs, they are more capable of selecting the right equipment to build their infrastructure.

SMBs, because of their fewer and more manageable infrastructure, have full utilization of their storage capacity and as they upgrade, can smoothly migrate to storage virtualization.

Likewise, SMBs do not have sizeable equipment that need to be retained and reused when upgrading to new storage infrastructure. Large enterprises are still holding on to older systems and would want these to be used in newer infrastructure, thus adding to complexity.

Keinan noted that 50 percent of IBM's Asia-Pacific storage virtualization business in 2005 largely came from SMBs. This is due to the fact that many SMBs with considerable storage demands have operations outside their countries, which stretches their IT infrastructure capabilities.

Keinan said IBM is expecting the SMB market to continue being one of their largest storage virtualization markets in Asia Pacific.

However, Keinan said one of the challenges of SMBs in Asia-Pacific is the lack of skills to manage their IT infrastructure, much less their storage virtualization capabilities. "It's this inexperience that needs to be constantly addressed."

Keinan said IBM closely works with their business partners and resellers to provide the technical capabilities for SMBs as well as large enterprises to manage their storage infrastructure.

Read the original, here.