Reldata focuses unified storage platform on midmarket, channel |
 |
By Dave Raffo, Senior News Director
22 Sep 2009 | SearchStorageChannel.com |
|
|
Reldata today upgraded its operating system to add data protection and management capabilities, and its new management team said the unified storage system vendor will become more focused on the channel and midmarket.
Parsippany, N.J.-based Reldata rolled out RELvos 2.4, a 64-bit operating system that powers its storage virtualization platform. The new operating system supports high availability via iSCSI mirroring, enhanced asynchronous replication, the ability to pause and resume replication at the point where it was interrupted, automatic expiration dates for snapshots and clones, and wizards for automating management processes.
CEO Steve Murphy says Reldata's roadmap includes a global file system, thin provisioning, SSD support, integration with VMware snapshots and Site Recovery Manager (SRM) next year, and data deduplication later down the road. Reldata's 9240i unified storage system supports NAS and iSCSI storage, and its 9240 NAS gateway supports Fibre Channel, NAS and iSCSI storage from other vendors.
Reldata also has a new management team. Former Softek and Plasmon CEO Murphy replaced Dave Hubbard as CEO in April and brought in Peter Cmaylo as vice president of worldwide sales to expand the company's VAR and direct marketing reseller (DMR) channels.
"It's unclear what Reldata was before we got there," Cmaylo said. "We've reorganized and refocused the company from a roadmap and go-to-market perspective. We're completely channel-focused now. The prior regime focused on the high end of the marketplace. Our idea is to compete with the Dell EqualLogic and Hewlett-Packard LeftHand part of the market. We have features they don't have, plus convergence of block and file storage."
Cmaylo said Reldata is going after the sub-$50,000 price range. Pricing for the 9420i begins at $21,891 with 6 TB of capacity.
Murphy said Reldata has more than 20 new channel partners and about 75 total partners. He sees Reldata's block and file support and storage virtualization as key value propositions.
"It's a market coming of age," Murphy said of unified storage. "Virtualization has created the unintended consequence of 'Now I need to align my storage.'"
While Reldata has virtualization and NAS support lacking in iSCSI-only rivals, it needs to fulfill its roadmap goals to battle competitors such as Dell and HP. IDC Research Manager Noemi Greyzdorf says the upgraded OS is a good start.
"They're putting in a lot of functionality and features around availability and data protection," she said.
Greyzdorf said most of Reldata's value is its support for other vendors' storage, as well as block and file protocols. "They can front-end other systems and serve as an aggregating point," she said. "The value for that is investment protection. You don't have to discard what you bought six months or a year ago if you buy a new system."
|
|
|
|
