With the SME storage market emerging as a key growth area, local vendors and resellers are now selling storage management solutions suited to the various requirements and limited budget of small businesses.

For instance, EMC Philippines has introduced storage solution packages that are centered on key business tasks for SMEs, which include consolidation, backup and recovery, information protection, e-mail management, content archiving, and database management.

Solution packages have been bundled with the EMC CLARiiON CX networked storage systems along with various software offerings such as backup software Networker, fixed content management software ApplicationXtender, e-mail archiving software EmailXtender, remote replication software MirrorView, and server virtualization software VMware. Packages start at US$45,000.

Local storage technology distributor Ecoline Systems Corporation is also pushing technologies for disk backup this year as a growing number of SMEs have been upgrading their current tape backups to disk backups.

'Even through simple means, more companies are beginning to acknowledge the need for data storage as they implement to have at least one form of data backup and data protection,' said Ecoline's Ron Flores.