Nexsan Nabs Partners

As a pioneer of disk-based backup, Nexsan Technologies Inc. once stood out among the crowd when tape was still king. Now, it's lining up partners to keep from getting lost in the crowd of disk backup proponents.

Nexsan began shipping ATA drives in 2001 with the claim that disk is a better backup medium for tape (see ATA Is Where It's AT). Now theres a slew of companies building around disk backup, and even the major tape vendors embrace disk (see Tape Vendors Grab Disk).

“We believe we helped create the entire ATA market in 2001 when nobody else was doing it,” says Rik Mussman, Nexan’s SVP of technology. “Now everybody and their brother’s doing it.”

There’s a plethora of companies included in the brotherhood of disk backup. Nexsan is partnering with a group of them to strengthen its value through its Strategic Solutions program. Nexan doesn’t bundle any of those vendors' products, but certifies them and uses the partnerships to open doors with customers who want to know what they can do with their disk.

Today, Nexsan added remote backup software startup Asigra Inc. as its newest partner, one day after adding NAS gateway vendor ONStor Inc. (See Eurobites: It's a Numbers Game and ONStor Joins Nexsan's Program).Mussman describes Asigra as a “very, very disk-centric backup” play. Asigra Televaulting for Enterprises is software that backs up data in remote sites and departments into a central archive in the data center (see Asigra's Path Forks). Asigra EVP Eran Farajun agrees with Nexsan’s philosophy that tape’s best days are behind it. “If it wasn’t for legacy-based tape solutions causing so many headaches, we wouldn’t be called into the party,” Farajun says.

Nexsan has sold only ATA and SATA disk since 2002, with names such as ATAbaby, ATAboy, ATABeast, and SATAblade (see Nexsan Ships New ATABeast, Nexsan Does SATA, and Nexsan Delivers ATAboy2). But just supplying disk isn’t enough anymore now that ATA and SATA are practically everywhere (see Survey: SATA, IP SANs Hot Priorities).

“When you’re a disk vendor like us, sometimes you get relegated to secondary storage,” Mussman says. “We see these partners as promoting disk-based technology to add value to our storage.”

Nexsan’s Strategic Solution partnerships also include Legato backup software from Arkivio Inc., virtual tape software from Diligent Technologies Corp., Legato backup software from EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), mainframe virtual tape software from Luminex Software Inc., and IP SAN switches from Sanrad Inc. (See Nexsan, Legato Team , Nexsan, Diligent Join Forces, and Nexsan, Sanrad Team on iSCSI).

— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch0