5 Storage Standouts

That news is doubly good when one considers that, of all the different segments of the IT industry, storage is arguably the most channel-friendly. Of the storage companies in the CRN Emerging Vendors data base, most get 90-plus percent of their revenue through VARs.

Here are five storage vendors that solution providers should take a closer look at:

1. Compellent
Compellent, an Eden Prairie, Minn.-based developer of software and hardware for automating tiered storage and replicating data across a WAN, is unusual in that, for the year before to the announcement of its first product, the company spent stealth mode in meetings with solution providers and their customers to find out what they needed. Compellent's products are sold exclusively through the channel.

2. Data Domain
If any company is synonymous with data duplication -- the technology in which any duplicate files or blocks of data are eliminated during the backup and archiving process to cut storage capacity requirements -- it's Data Domain. The Santa Clara, Calif., company claims that, by eliminating duplicate data, it can achieve up to 50:1 compression. About 95 percent of its business comes from the channel.

3. Teneros
Teneros focuses on a single product with a single mission, but one important to so many companies: an appliance that monitors Microsoft Exchange and, in the event of an Exchange server failure, instantly fails-over to a second server without impacting users. The Mountain View, Calif., company's product also does data recovery on Exchange in case data is lost or corrupted.

4. Mimosa Systems
Santa Clara-based Mimosa Systems combines e-mail archiving and recovery into one application running on Windows to enable individuals to index Exchange e-mail into a searchable database. The search is used for recovering individual e-mail messages that have become corrupted or lost. But its real power is for compliance and auditing, since users can do complex keyword searches of the database for legal purposes.

5. Acronis
Acronis developed True Image, an application that takes a hot snapshot of a running system, including system information and data, to enable fast recovery of physical and virtual servers for disaster recovery and business continuity purposes. The Burlington, Mass.-based company's product enables the recovery of crashed servers to a new physical or virtual server, as well as instant bare-metal restores.