Overland Targets SMBs With Storage Management Suite
The tape automation vendor, based here, last week unveiled its first suite of storage management applications, and it plans to expand its solution provider base by targeting SMB VARs focused on storage software, said John Cloyd, vice president and general manager of Overland Data's storage management unit.
The suite includes a storage resource manager that tracks storage usage, a storage planner for help in SAN deployment and a multivendor SAN manager.
Internal and External Storage Sales
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Overland Data assembled the bundle because it saw a need among its 250 solution provider partners for a storage management suite aimed at the SMB space,a market the company previously hadn't tapped, according to Cloyd. The product will be targeted mainly at customers with storage capacities of 1 Tbyte to 25 Tbytes, he added.
On the channel front, Overland Data plans to offer lead generation and distribution, tiered levels of support and access to training centers. Channel partners stand to make 18 percent to 30 percent margins on the storage software suite, and they also can sell annual maintenance contracts, Cloyd said.
The storage resource management application is available now. The SAN manager is slated to ship Aug. 1, and the storage planner is due out Oct. 31. Pricing will vary according to the amount of capacity managed, to a maximum of $20,000 per Tbyte. The software can be sold to manage as few as 100 Gbytes and, as data grows, customers can buy more access keys via their solution providers, Cloyd said.
Overland Data's product suite will help ease the deployment of backup solutions by eliminating a lot of junk data and, in turn, reducing hardware requirements, said Don McNaughton, sales manager at HorizonTek, a Huntington, N.Y.-based SMB solution provider. Overland Data wisely excluded a backup component from its suite so it wouldn't compete with offerings from other vendors, such as Veritas Software, he said.
What's more, Overland Data is a channel-driven partner, McNaughton added. "They have no direct sales, which is important to our world," he said. "There's never a situation where we compete with them."