HDS Adds iSCSI With Help From McData

HDS, Santa Clara, Calif., plans to bundle its Thunder 9570V array with McData's Eclipse 1620 iSCSI switch along with enablement services, said Peter Smails, senior director of global product marketing at HDS. "We want to provide a low-cost alternative to Fibre Channel," he said.

The bundle is aimed at smaller and midsize businesses that might not be able to afford a traditional SAN, Smails said. "We want to bundle products and services to help [such customers] with their storage networking."

Smails said iSCSI is finally starting to gain market momentum as it is embraced by such vendors as Microsoft, Cisco Systems and Intel. The bundle is HDS' first entry into iSCSI connectivity, but other products will come, he said.

The price of the bundle, including services, starts at around $60,000, which includes about 500 Gbytes of capacity. It is available immediately.

The critical part of the bundle is the services from assessment to deployment that HDS provides, Smails said. Such services will be initially available only from HDS, even though solution providers can resell the bundle and the HDS services.

However, Smails said, channel partners will be able to offer the services in the near future. "In October, we said we will roll out services through the channel," he said. "However, the training is not yet completed for partners to deliver the services, so HDS will not deliver the enablement until such training takes place."