Server-Class Disk Drives

Champ: Seagate

By Scott Campbell, ChannelWeb

3:00 PM EDT Fri. Apr. 14, 2006
From the April 17, 2006 issue of CRN

Nobody beats Seagate when it comes to server-class hard drives in the channel. Nobody.

The Scotts Valley, Calif."based vendor swept first place in all 15 technical and channel program criteria to earn the overall Channel Champions title.

On the technical criteria, Seagate's satisfaction rating of 87.7 came in a particularly wide 7.7 points ahead of Hitachi and Maxtor and 11.1 points ahead of Fujitsu.

"I like the fact that they have the high-capacity drives and they're taking the initiative to design drives for mission-critical applications, especially in NAS and SAN," said Samuel Sanchez, vice president of marketing at Coastline Micro,

a system builder in Irvine, Calif. "They design drives like the NL35 to be able to handle 24x7 read-write applications. The drives are becoming more sophisticated, more robust."

On channel program criteria, Seagate pulled 3.1 points ahead of runner-up Hitachi. The company's strength here was a 7.2-point lead in the area of vendor support.

"They do all the things you think every [vendor] partner should do but doesn't," said Andy Pratt, president and CEO of Unique Digital, a Houston solution provider. "They may not even be extraordinary things, but they do the common-sense things and they do them well. You know they're there.

He said Seagate once helped Unique Digital track down a large quantity of product from a variety of distribution sources to finish a big project. "They are very helpful at crunch time," he said. "They do their best to help you out."

Sanchez said Seagate has great channel programs, back-end rebates and support. "I have access to field-sales application engineers," he said. "If anything goes wrong, if I need a firmware upgrade or a drive to be looked at, they are there."

In the past year, Seagate introduced channel enhancements such as immediate access to the company's support staff without having to sit in a queue, said Desa Zraick, senior director of global channel programs and operations at Seagate.

"We put an organization in place, both corporate and in the field, that does not take the channel for granted," Zraick said.

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