Cloverleaf Turns To Channel For Intelligent SAN/NAS Appliance

The Southborough, Mass.-based developer of the Intelligent Storage Networking system, or iSN, is looking for channel partners with storage expertise to help add services such as business continuity, data migration, consolidation and provisioning, and scaling to customers' existing SANs, regardless of which storage and operating system platforms are in place, said Rich Bauer, president.

The company's new "Cloverleaf Connected channel partner program, the first since introducing the iSN in April, offers solution providers co-marketing programs, lead generation programs, training on the sales and engineering side, and demonstration unit discounts, said Bauer.

The iSN is an in-band system which sits on the SAN between servers and storage to centrally manage, monitor, and consolidate the capacity, bandwidth, and services across a SAN or NAS, said Bauer. "There's really no one else out there with a completely heterogeneous management device," he said. "EMC operates in EMC environments, and IBM operates in IBM environments. We don't care who the vendor is, or what hardware is used. We're really an open platform."

Dave Cozzens, executive vice president of services and technology at DaVinciTek, a Morristown, NJ-based solution provider that specializes in business continuity and ILM, said that traditional business continuity and storage management functions use proprietary storage controllers. They are expensive and are difficult to work with in heterogeneous environments. Other vendors put the intelligence on the servers, but that also typically limits which hardware can be connected, he said.

"Cloverleaf doesn't care what hardware, or what OS platform, or whether it's high-end or lower-cost hardware," Cozzens said. It moves the management functions from the storage controller or server to the storage network. This gives a great amount of control, and a great amount of flexibility with server and storage platforms."