Viking Enterprise Solutions Formed: Former OEM Storage Maker Newisys Rebrands With Channel Focus

Storage vendor Newisys has renamed itself as Viking Enterprise Solutions in a move to de-emphasis its role as an OEM producer of storage technology for sale under other vendors' names and refocus it on developing its own sales channels.

Viking Enterprise Solutions is a product division of Sanmina Corp., one of the world's largest contract manufacturers, and as Newisys was a huge server and storage subsystem manufacturer for OEM vendors, hyperscale cloud providers, and large systems integrators, said Dan Liddle, vice president of marketing for the company's servers and storage business.

Both companies are based in San Jose, Calif.

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As Newisys, it was a relatively unknown organization, Liddle told CRN. Newisys was until 2003 a stand-alone high-end server developer when it was acquired by Sanmina."We started doing more promotions at this year's Flash Memory Summit 2018," he said. "I'm very pleased with our strategy, and that we can now go public with this."

The company is rebranding to Viking Enterprise Solutions to better tie its vision to that of parent Sanmina, Liddle said.

"Sanmina is the 'Viking' brand for memory solutions," he said. "Renaming Newisys to Viking Enterprise Solutions reflects the dramatic changes we've made in the last few years."

Those changes include more than a change in focus from OEM to branded offerings, Liddle said. The company, which used to focus its manufacturing capabilities on high-capacity JBOD (just a bunch of disks, or non-RAID) storage sub-systems, is now developing high-capacity, high-density storage servers, all-flash and hybrid flash storage arrays, and NVMe-based storage.

"We're one of the early movers in NVMe," he said. "Today, we have one of the broadest sets of NVMe, NVMe-over-fabric, and NVMe JBOD offerings in the industry."

Viking Enterprise Solutions has not yet developed a channel program, but will do so as it builds out its software capabilities, Liddle said. He said building a channel is a priority of his.

"I have a lot of sensitivity on this," he said. "There will be deal registration, co-op funds, market development funds, and more. This will change gradually as the channel strategy is new for us."

In addition to unveiling a name change and a reorientation towards the channel, Viking Enterprise Solutions this week also used the Super Computing 2018 conference, held in Dallas, to unveil its NDS41020, a new high-density JBOD array that fits 102 large-capacity hard drives into a 4U rackmount chassis. Liddle said the NDS41020 is a fully enterprise-grade offering with no single point of failure.

The company also unveiled application-specific software packages, including software targeting high performance computing and media and entertainment application and its VES DRAID distributed RAID management software.