Westan goes NAS

IEI is the latest vendor to be signed under Westan's newly minted storage division, which divisional manager Philip Jackson claimed would contribute about $9 million or 10 percent of Westan's total $90 million revenue run rate by the end of this financial year.

"We're just kicking off and we're now starting to see orders rolling for tape and NAS [products]. We will see some impact [from the storage division] in the second quarter next year," he said.

Under the deal with ICP, Westan will distribute a range of NAS servers available in towers or 1U rack mounting with gigabit connections, a SCSI port for data backup and hot swap power supplies. It will also market NAS routers that provide WAN and LAN ports, firewall, print sharing and RAID. Wireless routers using the 802.11b standard will also be available.

Jackson said he expected these products to bite into the SAN marketplace due to the lack of knowledge in the local market around SAN technologies. He said the NAS servers are perfect for holding simple file and print applications.

In the meantime, Westan has also signed agreements with ADIC and NEC. It will distribute ADIC's LTO tape and AIT tape libraries to the SME market and NEC's NAS, fault tolerant servers and recently released Blade servers, Jackson said.

It also has existing agreements with the likes of Computer Associates, Fujifilm Media and LYNX storage solutions.

Jackson claimed that when users understand the value of using NAS for storage infrastructure, the bottlenecks associated with managing data will be reduced and the on costs will come down. "We recognise that both channel partners and end users need our help in understanding where NAS fits in," he said.