Moreover, adding data center space would likely have meant the expense and effort of setting up hardware in a different part of the building and running fiber between the two operations, Maliyil said.

Data Guard approached several vendors, and "Dell beat out the competition by a significant amount," Maliyil said. His company, which started as a consulting project three years ago, now has 35 employees. Support costs are unavoidable with the servers, but the company can run the SAN with a lean staff, meaning Maliyil didn't need to add more employees when business tripled.

The SAN has also made backups and disaster recovery easier. Previously, the servers at one data center were backed up over a point-to-point connection to another data center, using compression to reduce the amount of data transferred. Now Maliyil can push data from an entire server to another data center using EMC Corp.'s SAN Copy software, he said.

"If we had a physical disaster, we have the data stored remotely," he said, noting that the company doesn't do backups to tape any longer because restoring from a disk is faster -- and his customers demand the speed.

With the new setup, Maliyil said, he is ready for more corporate growth.