Cisco Launches Smart Storage For SMBs

Cisco is furthering their commitment to the SMB and the channel by introducing Cisco Smart Storage. It’s a family of “affordable” network storage solutions, all integrated with business applications. It’s also designed to be “highly secure” and to share sensitive data. If you’re VAR targeting SMBs with less than 100 employees, read on…

Competition in the SMB market has been particularly fierce lately. In April 2010, both Cisco and HP used their respective partner conferences to evangelize more SMB moves.

Now, Cisco is back with the NSS 300 series. Two, four and six-bay network storage units are available to provide SMB users with the appropriate amount of space they need. Cisco noted that using 2TB drives, you can max it out at 12TB of data capacity, but higher capacities will be available when bigger drives debut.

Some of the integrated business applications (which are expandable in the future) include a completely user-configurable Web Server with an integrated WordPress publishing platform, plus built-in server management and web-based configuration. There’s also the ability for Cisco Smart Storage to have secure remote Web access to critical business data, along with on-disk data encryption. File sharing is supported across “popular operating systems” or re-purposed as an iSCSI target for virtualization and clusters.

I spoke with Andrew Sage, VP of Small Business Sales Worldwide at Cisco and he briefly went over some of the points of profitability for VARs and partners..

Cisco has also designed the ability to wrap professional services around the deployment of the business applications on the NSS 300. As you’d guess, Cisco is providing support and services to partners selling the NSS 300 series, including tech and online support and next-day hardware replacement.

It’s available worldwide now, and the price tag on the devices range from from $913 to $5,625 depending on the model, and then the Small Business Pro Service is $149 for most of the NSS 300 configurations.

Sign up for The VAR Guy’s Newsletter; Webcasts and Resource Center; and via RSS; Facebook; Identi.ca; Twitter and VARtweet.