HDS In High Gear

HDS is uniting its partners into a single channel program for the first time, said Cathy Lott, manager of global channel marketing at the company, based here.

The new TrueNorth Solutions Alliance aims to bring increased collaboration among solution providers, developer partners and technology partners to create additional revenue opportunities for each, Lott said.

A key focus of the alliance will be new programs, including financial incentives, aimed at helping solution providers improve their HDS business.

Solution providers can earn up to 4 percent in market development funds on sales of modular storage array hardware and software and up to 3 percent in back-end rebates when they achieve predetermined objectives such as new accounts, revenue goals or competitive wins, Lott said.

HDS is also offering expanded financing capabilities via HDS Credit, as well as extended payment terms via HDS' distributors, she said.

HDS plans to formalize early next year its certification programs, including sales authorization and presales technical certification, especially around the company's modular arrays, Lott said. Initiatives are also under way to certify solution providers for implementation services, but those will not be finalized until next quarter, she said.

In addition, HDS is working on a deal-registration program, under which solution providers can register potential deals with the vendor to ensure that HDS' direct-sales force does not get involved in the sale. However, that program, which is expected to go live starting Jan. 1, will not prohibit other solution providers from bidding for the deal, Lott said.

Doug Koo, CEO of CAT Technologies, a Los Gatos, Calif.-based HDS and Sun Microsystems solution provider, said the new program will make it easier to work with HDS.

"Now they are taking the next step to take out anything in their program that is gray," Koo said. "This formalizes what was unwritten before. There may be situations that come up [that are not covered by the new program, but Hitachi has always been up-front with us."

HDS this week also plans to unveil the Thunder 9500V series of modular arrays, which is an extension of the Thunder 9200 with the addition of virtual port capabilities as well as increased capacity and performance, said Phil Townsend, HDS' vice president of global marketing and business development.

The 9530V departmental array offers usable capacity of between 200 Gbytes and 930 Gbytes, he said. The 9570V scales beyond 17 Tbytes, with two controllers and up to 14 hard drives in each 3U cabinet. The unit is a credible alternative to Hewlett-Packard's EVA array, Sun's T3 and 6800, the LSI array OEMed by IBM, and EMC's Clariion arrays, he said.

On the software side, HDS plans to release HiCommand version 2.2, a management suite compliant with the Common Information Model (CIM) specification, which allows storage software to manage multivendor arrays.

Included are the HiCommand Device Manager, which adds CIM capabilities to HDS arrays, and the HiCommand Tuning Manager, which allows customers to discover and report on the capacity and performance attributes of arrays to help in capacity planning and provisioning, Townsend said.

CIM compliance is important but will require time for customers to understand, Koo said. "Any time you educate the customer on anything, it takes time," he said. "And it's not just the customers. It takes time to train your own sales [reps. This is true of any vendor."