In the past few years, John Burke, principal research analyst at Mokena, Ill.-based The Nemertes Research Group Inc., has seen the data storage needs of small and midsized businesses (SMBs) soar. At the same time, he’s witnessed these same companies held back from addressing their storage requirements by the high cost of storage-area network (SAN) infrastructure and the need for specialized Fibre Channel skills.

But that’s all changing. These days, vendors large and small are courting SMBs with less complex SAN solutions based on the iSCSI interconnect standard, an alternative to Fibre Channel that runs on standard network infrastructure. “The newer offerings don’t require you to install a Fibre Channel network, and that alone will bring costs down,” Burke says.

Industry heavyweights such as Dell Inc., EMC Corp., Hewlett-Packard, and IBM Corp. have all developed SAN solutions that fit an SMB’s pocketbook and management abilities, Burke continues. In addition, smaller players such as Compellent Technologies Inc. and Xiotech Corp. are also working to woo small to midsize budgets. Mark Peters, a storage analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, of Milford, Mass., says the common goal among all of these vendors is providing SMBs with consolidated storage that’s cost efficient and easy to manage.

The proliferation of affordable SAN offerings comes amid growing acceptance of storage virtualization as a mainstream technology. An exclusive survey conducted for Accelerate by IDG Research Services Group recently found that storage virtualization ranks just under server virtualization as the top virtualization investment IT teams plan to make in the next 24 months. What’s more, over 80 percent of IT managers at companies already using storage virtualization said the technology has met or exceeded their expectations.

Storage virtualization abstracts logical storage repositories from physical ones, enabling IT teams to pool their storage resources instead of maintaining independent, underutilized hard drives in multiple locations. Storage vendors such as LeftHand Networks Inc. are using virtualization to make storage easy even for IT teams at small shops that have only a few servers but still want data sharing and advanced management features. SANs are a form of storage virtualization optimized for handling block-level data, such as the information in a database.

For those companies that don’t have the staffing to deploy and manage a SAN solution, Burke recommends working with an offsite storage vendor. “The storage service provider market is mature enough now, and there’s something to be said for not having to rotate out your backup tapes,” he notes.

Sandra Gittlen is a freelance technology editor in the greater Boston area. She can be reached via email at sgittlen@charter.net.