STORAGE

Silicon Graphics today announced that SGI InfiniteStorage solutions are taking front and center stage in a newly expanded SGI Channel Program. A special emphasis has been placed on recruiting new storage-centric value-added resellers (VARs) whose primary business is the supply and integration of data storage solutions and services. Recently SGI has signed reseller agreements with twelve storage-dedicated Solution Providers that join a global community representing SGI InfiniteStorage to customers around the world. "These specialists are delivering an expertise in architecting and implementing storage solutions as well as providing broader market reach for SGI InfiniteStorage offerings," commented Nancy Pierce, director, North America Channel Sales and Marketing, SGI. The community of SGI InfiniteStorage resellers is offering customers the benefits of highly scalable storage systems, which solve customer problems such as: * Managing explosive data growth * Implementing storage consolidation * Managing the spiraling cost of storage infrastructure * Achieving regulatory compliance * Providing business continuity "Networked storage represents the greatest area of growth for indirect channels in the storage market, and SGI InfiniteStorage solutions provide flexible, differentiated capabilities in this space," said Janet Waxman, vice president, Hardware Channels Research, IDC. "SGI's new channel initiative offers new opportunities for growth for storage-centric resellers." SGI's most recent recruits are storage-centric solution providers. They are experts in information technology (IT) and have strong customer relationships within corporate IT departments - a targeted growth area where SGI InfiniteStorage solutions can deliver the high performance bandwidth and infallible reliability once only required by government agencies, the scientific community, and manufacturing, higher education and research customers. Each is strategic in the geographic territory they address as well as the customers they serve. New SGI InfiniteStorage Channel Partners include: North America: Houston Information Team LLC Houston & Dallas, Texas Placentia, California Open Systems Solutions, Inc. (OSSI) Yardley, Pennsylvania Reston, Virginia NET Source Storage Littleton, Colorado RedBridge IT San Carlos, California Zentra Computer Technologies Vancouver, British Columbia Montreal, Quebec Ottawa & Toronto Ontario Asia Pac Apara Bangalore, India Digistore Sydney Australia Extreme Video Beijing China Redington Chennai India Europe: HOPEN Paris, France APX Paris, France CALISEO Lyon, France "The potential of SGI InfiniteStorage solutions goes beyond the company's core markets so we designed a Channel program to create opportunities for resellers in a broad range of technical and enterprise markets," said Pierce. "We continue to work with resellers well established within SGI's core markets, growing the market space that we're already in and now our solution providers are opening up a whole new broad market for us in corporate IT data centers that we haven't previously addressed." Created for the world's most data intensive environments and currently managing petabytes of data, SGI InfiniteStorage solutions are applicable to any customer facing the need for a highly scalable storage infrastructure to meet their overwhelming data growth. For example, every company faces the challenge of increasing backup and recovery efficiency and reliability. SGI holds the world record for data backup and recovery at 10TB per hour with absolute data integrity. "To ensure that SGI is the strongest, most competitive partner to the reseller community, we will soon be announcing an enhanced program for all of our solution providers that will provide an even higher level of value and greater opportunities to sell SGI InfiniteStorage solutions," concluded Pierce.