Pranah Brings Big Features to Small Customers
Company:
Headquarters: Mendota Heights, Minn.
Technology Sector: Storage
Key Product: Pranah U1200 Series
Year Founded: 2005
Number of Channel Partners: A handful of beta partners; plans to add 50 North American solution providers in 2010
Ideal Channel Partner: Small business-focused solution providers
Why You Should Care: Pranah Storage Technologies has a channel-only sales strategy for its storage appliance, which includes all the key software features an SMB could want.
The Lowdown: Pranah Storage Technologies is targeting the SMB storage market with a channel-only appliance that includes most of the top enterprise storage features.
Pranah's new U1200 series storage appliance, currently in beta, comes with a software stack that includes thin provisioning, snapshot and both NAS and iSCSI SAN capabilities, said Dave Walstad, vice president of sales and marketing for Pranah.
The appliance also includes 10-Gigabit Ethernet connectivity and support for SAS, SATA, and Fibre Channel hard drives. Options include distributed file systems, tiered storage and synchronous and asynchronous replication.
Pricing for the Pranah U1200 is set to start at $2.15 per Gbyte for a 1U enclosure with a dual controller and 8 Tbytes of iSCSI storage. When configured with 80 Tbytes in a 4U form factor, the price drops to about 61 cents per Gbyte, Walstad said.
The official release of the U1200 has been moved back to late this quarter or early 2010, which actually works to the advantage of prospective channel partners, said Steve Carter, president of Pranah, which was honored earlier this year with a Sprout Award by Channelweb.com parent company Everything Channel and Sightline Group.
"A lot of solution providers have their main revenue in the fourth quarter," Carter said. "Any time you bring something new to market, there's training to be done. It can be very disruptive."
For partners, Pranah offers a 30 percent margin on the U1200 enclosure, which comes without hard drives, letting solution providers do the configuration.
Pranah was founded in 2005 as a spinoff from Marner Storage Technologies, an early builder of rack mount servers based on Sun Microsystems technology which developed its own technology for reducing vibration in rack mount devices.