Quantum Expands Product, Service Offerings For Partners
The new products, services, and programs are an extension of the company's Prism Storage Architecture, said Kristine Mitchell, product manager for the company's P-series of tape libraries.
Prism, which was first introduced in 1999, uses a modular backplane approach to allow remote storage management and Fibre Channel connectivity, Mitchell said.
Quantum this month plans to start shipping the FC470, an embedded 2 Gbits per second Fibre Channel controller option for its P4000 and P7000 libraries, said Mitchell. Two to three months later, Quantum will make the FC470 available for the company's legacy P2000, P3000, and P6000 libraries, she said. The FC470, which includes two Fibre Channel and four Ultra160 SCSI ports, has a list price of $11,995.
Next week, Quantum also plans to simplify the pricing of its services across all its product lines, Mitchell said.
The company will also introduce a new Investment Protection Program that allows legacy tape autoloaders and libraries regardless of vendor to be traded in for new Quantum libraries at up to a 20 percent discount, said Mitchell. The discount will be determined through a simplified matrix that depends only on whether the legacy device is an autoloader or library, the number of the drives it has and whether it has a 1Gbps or 2Gbps Fibre Channel connector, she said.
This Summer, Quantum will also offer solution providers a product bundle consisting of a P-series tape library and the DX-30 disk-to-disk backup appliance that allows customers to do incremental backups, Mitchell said.
The company will also introduce a new Storage Care Partner Program, which Mitchell said will provide simplified training and certification to solution providers who wish to offer their own installation and support programs to customers.
This fall, Quantum plans to introduce a new service that allows customers to assess their data protection capabilities and identify possible storage pain points and business objectives, said Mitchell. The tool can be used by solution providers to develop possible solutions for customers, she said.