Seagate, Infortrend Team On $400 SATA Rebate For VARs
Solution providers who purchase one of 11 qualified Infortrend SATA arrays with an iSCSI, SCSI, serial-attached SCSI (SAS), or 4-Gbps Fibre Channel host interface along with six of Seagate's new 750-Gbyte Barracuda ES SATA drives will receive a $400 rebate in the form of a debit card, said Paul McLeod, technical sales and marketing manager at Infortrend, which has headquarters in Taipei, Taiwan and Santa Clara, Calif.
Each solution provider organization can apply for a maximum of six rebates, which are jointly sponsored by the two companies, McLeod said.
Seagate does not have a similar rebate program for the new drives with any other array vendors, he said.
"Infortrend is the first to qualify the drive for a RAID solution," McLeod said. "It comes at a time when Seagate is also starting to offer business-critical SATA hard drives. Before, its SATA focus was on the desktop.
Keith Fischbach, president of Padova Technologies, a Columbia, Md.-based solution provider, said Infortrend offers great arrays that are priced right.
But like Infortrend and other smaller storage vendors, Padova works with very low margins on the hardware it sells, Fischbach said. "It's nice to have vendors give us extra support with rebates and discounts," he said. "We're pretty exclusive with Infortrend, so it's nice to get something back in any capacity."
About 30 percent of Infortrend's sales are branded with the vendor's EonStor moniker and sold through the channel, with the rest coming from OEMs such as Sun Microsystems, a fact that helps Padova sell the EonStor products, Fischbach said.
"Their controllers are used in everything including Sun," he said. "But if you say 'Infortrend' to most customers, they say, what? So we say to customers, look at Sun's 3510 and 3511 arrays. The menuing system is identical to the Infortrend system, but Infortrend is half the price. And people say, cool."
The EonStor arrays are distributed by Bell Microproducts and Condre Storage in the United States, McLeod said. However, the Seagate drives can be sourced from any Seagate distributor to be eligible for the rebate, he said.
The rebate program is scheduled to end March 31.