Storage specialist Iomega is expanding its products with a range of desktop and mobile add-on solutions. The company is also moving into the low-cost network-attached storage market, which could offer attractive options for firms needing to quickly provide capacity for branch offices or departments.

Some industry observers credit Iomega with revolutionising the desktop storage market in the last decade, with its Zip high-capacity floppy-disk product. However, storage requirements have been increasing dramatically since the arrival of Zip disks, and the firm is now basing a number of its new solutions on hard-disk technology.

"Storage needs will grow enormously over the next few years," said Ulrike Tegtmeier, Iomega's vice president and managing director. The company has decided to focus on small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), she said, because this was a significant market and because Iomega's products fit this sector best.

She added that Iomega would still sell to larger firms but noted, "We play more of a role in personal storage - what users have on their desks and carry with them when they go out on the road."

Iomega's latest products, announced earlier this month, are a range of add-on hard disks for storage expansion and backup for mobile and desktop users.

The HDD Portable Hard Drive models offer up to 40GB capacity and weigh just 250g, while the slightly heavier HDD External Hard Drive models offer up to 120GB. "Large capacities and small formats will be the future," Tegtmeier predicted.

As part of the focus on SMEs, Iomega also announced that it would ship its first network-attached storage (NAS) products in June. The NAS A300 series will offer 120GB capacity, while the NAS P400 series will offer up to 480GB and support the hot-swapping of failed drives.

The rollouts are a natural extension of Iomega's product range into the back office, according to senior product manager Joseph Saroukanian. "This type of plug-and-play solution is ideal if you just need some additional storage capacity," he argued. "Why buy a full-blown server system when you can have a NAS box, ready optimised for file sharing?"

The entry-level unit will be the only NAS solution under £1,000 to support Raid 5 when it ships, Saroukanian added. He pointed out that SMEs are likely to be the biggest market for Iomega's NAS products, since larger corporations tend to consider price as secondary to service and support contracts. However, the products could still find their way into departments or workgroups within large firms as they would not require an IT manager to install them, but could still be managed centrally.

Moving forward, Iomega sees little future in magneto-optical (MO) storage - an area that it only moved into last year when it announced its MO 1.3GB Professional product. "MO is a declining market," said Tegtmeier. "Customers are choosing tape, hard disk or other magnetic media instead." Although MO technology is better suited to the long-term archiving of information, she suggested that customers are probably more familiar and more comfortable with magnetic media.

Tegtmeier believes that the ubiquitous Zip product will survive for a few years. "Zip will be around for the next two to four years, because it has enough [capacity]," she said, adding that a version with greater capacity than the current 250MB product would probably be launched before Zip is finally phased out.

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