Infortrend announces new SAN family for SMB market 10 March, 2010 By Mark Cox

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"Infortrend has been around for the last 16 years and people tend to be more familiar with us for our OEM solutions," said Behrouz Zali, senior director for Infortrend. "We made a very conscious decision to move into the market with our own solutions, and in April of last year Infortrend, moved into the channel with our ESVA (Enterprise Scalable Virtualized Architecture) enterprise solutions. The EonStor DS family is aimed more at the SMB and mid-market."

Infortrend is marketing the EonStor DS products as offering enterprise-class quality at an SMB pricepoint. Built on a high availability hardware platform, EonStor DS supports storage-based snapshot and volume copy/mirror. All redundant modules including controllers, power supplies and cooling fans are hot-swappable to achieve high fault-tolerance capability. Full RAID protection ensures continuous data accessibility and data integrity, even when up to two drives fail. Infortrend also integrates its' CacheSafe technology into EonStor DS arrays to safeguard cached data during power outages. Infortrend allows users to centrally manage multiple EonStor DS systems with SANWatch, its feature-rich management suite.

"We are competing based on price performance," Zali said. "Today, most budgets are still completely frozen, and even the big names are competing for much smaller budgets in the enterprises. That gives us an opportunity with a robust solution, to offer the bells and whistles at a pretty good price. We see a lot of opportunities coming our way right now."

Zali said that Infortrend's long manufacturing legacy and their ability to make all parts of their solution in-house give them a competitive advantage.

"Because everything is designed and manufactured in-house, and nothing is OEMed from anybody, we are very flexible what we can add, and we can respond to the needs of the market," he said.

Zali said that in today's economy, while their competition talks about the cost of ownership, what the customer will save in the next five years, but today customers also want to hear what you will save today. We are winning market share because we can show those savings"

The DS product family, like Infortrend's other channel products, are sold only through the channel, and not to the OEM business side. Bell Micro and Condre Storage handle their distribution to their close to 20 American channel partners. Zali said that while they are still looking for more partners with an established storage practice, their objective is to have no more than 30 in the U.S.

The first EonStor DS models come with host connectivity choices of 8Gb/s Fibre Channel (FC), 4Gb/s FC and 1GbE iSCSI. Additional EonStor DS family models will be available in the near future.