Intransa To Recruit Storage VARs To Sell New iSCSI Appliance

Intransa is looking to sell its IP5000 iSCSI appliance exclusively through the channel and has already signed three channel partners, said Peter Behrakis, director of sales at the San Jose, Calif.-based company, which was spun off from 3Com in late 2000.

The IP5000 is a storage appliance that bundles a third-party industry-standard server with Intransa's software applications. The applications, all of which were developed in-house, include volume management, virtualization, RAID management and device discovery, said Behrakis.

"Our goal is to let whoever sells it for us to just drop it into a Gigabit Ethernet network," he said. "All you need is an iSCSI driver or an iSCSI host bus adapter."

The IP5000 allows up to three disk enclosures, each with a maximum capacity of 3.2 Tbytes using ATA hard drives, to be connected to a single controller, Behrakis said. Each drive behind the controller can be assigned its own unique IP address, allowing the IP5000 to scale either in number of controllers or in number of hard drives or both at the same time, he said.

The company said it soon plans to unveil a new version that allows two or three controllers to connect to up to five to eight enclosures, Behrakis said.

Intransa is planning to continue recruiting partners with experience selling storage solutions and Ethernet networks and for which storage is a material part of their business, Behrakis said.

One solution provider, whose company's engineers have been testing the IP5000, said it seems to be a good product from an engineering point of view. "However, we haven't sold one yet, so we can't comment on what customers think," the solution provider said.

Regardless, now is the time to be considering iSCSI products, said the solution provider, who requested anonymity. "That's where the world is going," the solution provider said. "There's no doubt in mind that there'll be iSCSI in the future. This is bleeding-edge stuff."