2011 Need To Know: Storage Vendors

Storage Vendors Present Ample Opportunities for Solution Providers

Being asked to list 25 storage vendors that all solution providers need to know is an unfair proposition. With infinite possibilities, how does one decide? The storage business is probably the most channel-friendly part of the IT industry, with perhaps a couple of thousand vendors that either work exclusively or in large part through the channel.

Because there is not enough room to list 2,000 storage vendors solution providers should know, the following list was designed to provide a mix of vendors that represent different parts of the storage industry. We’ve also included the channel chiefs at each of these vendors to help point you in the right direction.

Amazon

Channel Chief: Terry Wise


Any company that can store 262 billion customer objects by late 2010 is definitely a storage company to know. Amazon’s S3 storage cloud proves that storage clouds can be and are being built.

Brocade

Channel Chief: Barbara Spicek


Brocade proved it could lessen its dependency on Fibre Channel with a strong move into Ethernet and wireless networking and in the process remain a force for building storage networks.

CA

Channel Chief: David Roberts


CA, which seemed to be flirting with relative obscurity for several years, recently rebuilt its ARCserve brand, and the technology behind it, making it once again an important data protection vendor.

Cisco

Channel Chief: Edison Peres


A latecomer to the storage networking game, Cisco has led the way in defining the new data center infrastructure as a unified combination of storage, server and IP networking resources.

CommVault

Channel Chief: Mark Conley


CommVault is so focused on data protection that it has become the vendor of choice for VARs looking to bring their customers an alternative to the primary storage suppliers out there.

Dell

Channel Chief: Gregory Davis


Dell has made a couple of shrewd storage-related acquisitions, including EqualLogic and Compellent, that has turned it into a storage powerhouse and a serious channel contender to boot.

EMC

Channel Chief: Gregg Ambulos


The king of enterprise storage, EMC recently set its sights on dominating the small business storage market and on quickly expanding its channel base to make that domination happen.

Emulex

Channel Chief: Shaun Walsh


Emulex is a key supplier of Fibre Channel over Ethernet interface cards for legacy Fibre Channel customers and a top supplier of 10-GbE NICs for high-speed iSCSI SANs.

FalconStor

Channel Chief: Brendan Kinkade


FalconStor offers a platform that combines deduplication, continuous data protection and network storage—all WAN-optimized for disaster recovery and replication.

Hewlett-Packard

Channel Chief: Stephen DiFranco


HP is making waves with storage, server and networking technologies for building data center infrastructures and has committed to using them to build clouds.

Hitachi Data Systems

Channel Chief: Mike Walkey


When it comes to virtualizing heterogeneous storage, HDS has the technology behind which almost any enterprise vendor’s storage arrays can be combined into a single pool.

IBM

Channel Chief: Rich Hume


IBM’s strong server business makes for an equally strong storage business, with such capabilities as high availability, virtualization, scale-out NAS, and enterprise-class disk and tape arrays.

Intel

Channel Chief: Steve Dallman


Intel chips probably power more storage devices than any other and have helped storage vendors bring enterprise-class features to the midrange. It also has become an early SSD leader.

Microsoft

Channel Chief: Jenni Flinders


Trying to protect all of the data created by Microsoft applications such as Exchange, PowerPoint and SharePoint is a full-time job, making Microsoft expertise key to handling storage.

NetApp

Channel Chief: Julie Parrish


NetApp made NAS the important market it has become and is the pioneer of unified storage, which combines NAS and SAN capabilities and connectivity in a single storage appliance.

Netgear

Channel Chief: Lee Finck


The king of entry-level rackmount and desktop NAS appliances, Netgear has probably enabled more small businesses and SOHOs to take advantage of NAS than any other company.

Nexsan

Channel Chief: Walter Palhetas


Nexsan is a leader in bringing reliable, high-capacity storage to the SMB masses, having pioneered the use of low-cost disk storage to replace higher-end storage more than a decade ago.

OCZ

Channel Chief: Alex Mei


OCZ has helped boost the nascent SSD market with a wide range of SSDs, including 1.8-, 2.5- and 3.5-inch form factors, as well as models for embedded and portable markets.

Oracle

Channel Chief: Judson Althoff


Oracle inherited a fading storage business with its acquisition of Sun and is now closely tying that storage to its servers and ubiquitous enterprise applications in appliance-like offerings.

QLogic

Channel Chief: Jim Rothstein


Connecting storage networks is certainly QLogic’s specialty, with interface cards, switches and routers for InfiniBand, Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet and Ethernet networks.

Seagate

Channel Chief: John Vossoughi


Seagate is one of the two main hard drive vendors, along with Western Digital, and has been the company in the enterprise market the longest. Seagate has the widest range of drives available, including self-encrypting models.

STEC

Channel Chief: Scott Stetzer


STEC provided the SSDs used by EMC, which was the first storage array vendor in the industry to make SSDs an option in its storage arrays. STEC today supports a wide range of OEM storage vendors.

Symantec

Channel Chief: Randall Cochran


Symantec is the largest independent developer of data protection and security software, and its Backup Exec and NetBackup storage applications and suites are common solution provider staples.

Western Digital

Channel Chief: Phay Lam


Western Digital in 2010 for the first time beat rival Seagate in terms of hard drives shipped. Western Digital’s March announcement that it planned to buy Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has served to solidify its lead in the space.

Xiotech

Channel Chief: Mark Glasgow


Xiotech has taken an innovative approach to storage arrays with its Intelligent Storage Element technology, which features redundant hard drives, controllers and power in a sealed canister for reliability.