HDS Targets SMBs With Special Storage Array

HDS, Santa Clara, Calif., this week plans to unveil the Thunder 9520V, an entry-level modular storage array and the first specifically designed by the company for the channel.

The 9520V will be welcomed both by smaller companies looking to deploy their first SANs and consolidate their storage and by larger companies looking for remote office SANs that can be connected to their data centers, said Dave Cerniglia, president of Consiliant Technologies, a solution provider in Irvine, Calif. "It's a huge market Hitachi traditionally has not tapped."

Mark Teter, CTO of Advanced Systems Group, a Sun and HDS solution provider based in Denver, said many of his small-business customers are considering disaster-recovery and replication solutions, but their budgets are limited.

Issues like compliance and e-mail archiving are driving small-business storage solutions in a way unheard of only five years ago, said Dave Roberson, president and COO of the vendor.

The 9520V delivers up to 13 Tbytes of SATA hard-drive capacity with cached bandwidth up to 4.2 Gbytes per second and includes one or two controllers. The unit is targeted at businesses with as few as 50 people, said Jeff Hill, director of infrastructure and product marketing at HDS. The "sweet spot" is companies with about 300 people, he said.

The 9520V is mainly targeted at the gap between EMC's entry-level AX100 and Clariion CX300 arrays, Hill said. In a configuration of 3 Tbytes of capacity and two controllers, the AX100 is priced at less than $14,000, compared with about $25,000 for a similarly configured CX300. The price for the comparable 9520V configuration ranges from $22,000 to $24,000.

The 9520V will be available in the United States via Access Distribution, Arrow Electronics, Keylink and Bell Microproducts, said Tom Valiente, vice president of channels for the Americas at HDS.

While HDS will look to expand channel sales with the 9520V, it will be very conservative in terms of increasing its number of solution providers, he said. "We don't have a land-grab philosophy, but instead we want to help our existing installed base."