Digitiliti Goes Public, Brings Managed Storage To Channel

Digitiliti, which last week became a publicly listed company on the Pink Sheets thanks to a reverse merger of its former company, Storage Elements, and holding company Cyclone Holdings, is also recruiting solution providers to bring its service to customers large and small, said Brad Wenzel, CEO of the Minneapolis-based company.

Wenzel, who until a couple of years ago ran Wenzel Data, a Stillwater, Minn.-based storage solution provider, said Digitiliti allows both volume-level and file-level recovery of data stored in its data center, which is located in the basement of the former Federal Reserve Bank in Minneapolis.

The service works with any customer hardware and software platform, and can be used to store data from multiple gigabytes to multiple petabytes in capacity, Wenzel said. The data capacity is reduced via compression and incremental backups to about one-third of its original size and is protected with encryption, he said.

Digitiliti also provides its technology in the form of a software application which customers can use to set up their own disk-based, capacity-optimized backup for on-site and off-site storage, he said. "So regardless of your recovery needs, you are covered," he said.

The company is currently working with about 50 solution providers, Wenzel said. It is recruiting solution providers with experience selling tape and/or WAN technology, and that know how to deal with data storage issues. "We want partners that understand that data is just 0s and 1s," he said.