Fujitsu, OnStor Take Swipe At NetApp - Deal Gives Storage VARs New Choices
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Gary Newgaard, President of Paragon Systems, a Washington-based partner of both Fujitsu and OnStor, says the agreement opens up a
much greater addressable market for the channel, giving both Fujitsu VARs and
customers and OnStor VARs and customers access to the Bobcat technology. Newgaard says the Bobcat also fills a gap in
Fujitsu's storage product line for midmarket businesses who need to link
multiple storage domains, many of which are on hardware from different vendors.
OnStor says the Bobcat offers a solid state design with
multi-core processing for extremely fast performance. The Bobcat's OpenSAN storage support is
heterogeneous, allowing the Bobcat to work with storage devices from any
storage hardware vendor. The modular
Bobcat allows VARs to add power and capacity on-demand and the
included EverON software suite allows for both data management and data
protection, OnStor officals say.
According to Gallivan, virtualization capabilities are built into the Bobcat and the devices are certified to work with VMware's virtualization
technology.
While the built-in virtualization capabilities may excite some resellers, Newgaard says the real value of OnStor's Bobcat
lies in the fact that customers get enterprise-class file serving and storage performance
at reasonable prices.
"This gives solution providers the same capability to
connect multiple data stores for midmarket businesses that customers get on the
high-end enterprise level, and the software licensing fees are still very
appealing," Newgaard says.
Newgaard says that while he believes Fujitsu has one of the
most comprehensive technology portfolios ranging from supercomputers to
consumer notebooks, the vendor hasn't traditionally been strong in NAS in North America.
He says he'd been approached by Fujitsu in February 2008
about carrying their storage products, and says he's looking forward to
bringing the Bobcat to market. "Fujitsu's definitely trying to get more front-of-mind
awareness in the U.S. market, and this is a great way to do it. OnStor's really
good at connecting disparate data stores no matter what vendor created the
drives," Newgaard said.
The OnStor Bobcat NAS Gateway will be integrated into
Fujitsu's Eternus product offering but will remain OnStor branded, says
Gallivan. The companies are in talks to
distribute the solution through Tech Data and CDW, he says.
