Distributors are also angling for a piece of the custom storage market. MA Labs, San Jose, Calif., for instance, builds about 2,000 arrays for solution providers per month and is watching that business slowly grow, said Scott Twomey, worldwide sales manager.
Another San Jose distributor, Bell Microproducts, gives solution providers a choice of custom-built arrays, said Phil Roussey, executive vice president of enterprise solutions. The distributor builds arrays under OEM contracts for clients needing at least 10 units per month, and it will custom- configure arrays using branded or unbranded chassis for solution providers as needed. The arrays can be tuned for applications such as high-bandwidth video streaming, he said.
While many system builders are seeing their custom storage business grow, a few are watching it dwindle. Media Integration, Soquel, Calif., builds arrays mainly for its server customers but has been building fewer over time, said Charlie Cohen, sales engineer. The company uses controllers from Infotrend in its arrays. However, since Infotrend is now also building arrays, Media Integration finds itself more often reselling that vendor's prebuilt models and just stuffing them with hard drives, Cohen said.
The only time Media Integration builds its own arrays is when its financial or media customers have special requirements, such as a SCSI RAID array with four or five host ports. "No one makes them like that," he said.
New technologies, including Serial ATA (SATA) hard drives and Microsoft's Windows Storage Server 2003 operating system for NAS appliances, are helping to drive the custom storage business.
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