Sabio Gets Back To Basics With New Storage Array
The CM-4 array is Sabio&'s first foray into the custom-built storage market. The San Diego-based vendor is a new sister company to Sabio Products, which develops white-box notebook PCs that are sold through the channel with no CPU, hard drive or memory, said Ajay Gupta, general manager.
It is also completely field-serviceable by the custom system solution provider, he said. The company provides replacement motherboards and backplanes to its channel partners to complete repairs.
The CM-4 includes RAID levels 0, 1 and 5 for up to four hard drives, meaning that one drive could fail without impacting the data, Gupta said. The drives are hot-swappable and data from a failed drive can be rebuilt on a new drive while the array is running.
Sabio is selling its CM-4 array exclusively through the system-builder channel, Gupta said. “The VAR buys the box and buys SATA or SATA-II hard drives based on the customer and the solution needs,” he said. “This is value-add at the absolute base level.”
Target customers include home users and small businesses with less than 30 PCs, especially companies without their own IT departments that rely on solution providers for help.
Fremont, Calif.-based system-builder Wintec is currently offering the CM-4 to other solution providers as either diskless or with up to four hard drives, said Andy Tseng, solution sales marketing manager.
Tseng said the array is suitable for small businesses that are moving toward paperless operations, such as medical and dental firms that are considering sending X-rays over a network instead of pulling physical film. “This is a very easy way to add storage to a network and let users share files, presentations and applications,” he said.
Wintec has done business with Sabio&'s whitebook products for about a year. “Their technology is based on Intel, and they use common building blocks,” Tseng said. “Sabio uses hard drives from most vendors, and compatibility with industry-standard products is perfect.”
Currently available to solution providers, the CM-4 is priced at less than $500 with no hard drives. Gupta said he expects the retail price to be about $1,000 for a 1-Tbyte configuration.