SCALING UP

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Updated : May 11, 2014 0:0  ,
By Editor

Late last year, Seagate announced a broadening of its enterprise storage portfolio with the release of the Seagate Business Storage rackmount NAS, delivering centralized backup, data protection and remote access to critical information for small and medium-sized business organizations (SMBs). Ayman Al-Ajouz, Sales Manager MENA, Seagate discusses Seagate’s growing                                                           focus on storage solutions for Business users


Discuss Seagate’s growing focus on NAS storage for business users. What are the strengths you offer as a manufacturer of NAS storage devices?

Seagate is known for storing the world’s content. Households and SMBs continue to generate a significant amount of data, and need fast and reliable storage solutions. Keeping consumers and businesses in mind, we have dedicated NAS storage devices to offer both parties even in a mixed platform environment of Windows and Mac devices.

With the industry’s first hot-swappable 8-bay 1U rackmount NAS and our new 4-bay rackmount NAS, our latest solutions take the lead in this category with top performance and the highest capacity at an approachable price point for our SMB customers. Our business NAS devices also give users the ability to save and share data for multiple computers, whether they are Macs or PCs, allowing them to access that data whether they are sitting in the same room with the network or securely when they are on the go, over the Internet. Through our partnership, organizations can now tap into the benefits and scale of enterprise level IT systems while easily backing up all the computers in their home or office to their Seagate NAS device, and then access that data from each computer.

Today implementation of a Seagate NAS system is also made easier with support software that goes a long way in simplifying installations, customizing error recovery controls, improving power management, and fine-tuning vibration tolerance.

What are the different kinds of NAS storage devices you offer?

Today we offer the industry’s broadest portfolio of hard disk drives, solid-state drives and solid-state hybrid drives, as well as an extensive line of retail storage products for consumers and small businesses along with data-recovery services for any brand of hard drive and digital media type. Seagate Business NAS and Seagate Business Storage Rackmount NAS are a few of the latest solutions we provide to address the changing needs of small office / home office (SOHO), remote mobile office (RMO) and small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

When it comes to Seagate Business NAS, our 2 and 4-bay versions of Seagate Business Storage have capacities ranging from 4 to 16 terabytes, delivering maximum data protection by providing redundant backups of the information stored on the device. Also, the addition of a Universal Storage Module (USM) slot allows for plug-n-play removable external drives to be input and removed from the device for improved workflow and offsite backup capability.

In terms of Seagate Business Storage rackmount NAS, the Seagate Business Storage 1U rackmounts 8-bay and 4-bay 1U rackmount form factors in capacities ranging from 4 to 32 terabytes,  providing the performance needed for businesses to support multiple simultaneous connections and enable everyone within an organization to easily backup and share files

With different configurations are being made available, and what are the faster moving ones in sell out?

We are experiencing good sales on mostly all different models that we are currently offering. It all depends on the customers’ needs. Nevertheless, I’d say that the 4-Bay Business Storage model is in particularly high demand in the region.

What is the distribution strategy for these products? Who are your distributors in the region?

We engage with nearly all major retailers through campaigns and through marketing. We also have rebate programs for certain retailers to further enhance our sales with them, and to give partners an incentive for doing business with Seagate. We used to have a distribution team that does everything, but now we have a team focused on the retail side of Seagate’s business. What we’re looking at is targeting the high-end product, which is an added value to the customers

On the distribution side we currently have two regional distributors, FDC and Asbis, and ECS servicing the local market in Egypt.

What are the top 3 customer verticals you are focusing on? Are there any significant activities Seagate did for raising awareness of these products in the regional channel/industry?

At our annual Middle East Partner Conference which was held in February, we outlined a new class of video surveillance, SSHD, NAS, enterprise and cloud technologies. This has included Seagate’s latest network-attached storage HDD lineup and two new enterprise HDD offerings. We are also planning on the Middle East launch of the Backup Plus FAST & the Backup Plus Slim personal devices, which were unveiled to much acclaim at CES 2014.

What strengths do these products offer for customers looking to leverage cloud based storage more?

There are numerous cloud service providers in the region today who offer storage-as-a-service. One of the key advantages of cloud storage is that it provides notably easy access to your data from any place where there is an Internet connection. In view of this, an increasing number of SMEs are adopting a mixed approach to their storage needs. While leveraging on the benefits of what the cloud has to offer, they also integrate a NAS solution into their cloud environment.

Hundreds of small and medium-sized businesses in the Middle East today already depend on NAS solutions. For many of them, meeting storage requirements can be even more challenging than for large enterprises as they desire high capacity, efficient storage while dealing with limited budget and dedicated IT resources.

Besides NAS, discuss other business-user focused products from Seagate?

Over the past decade, the explosive growth of large-scale, data-driven applications has begun to shift the nature of enterprise storage infrastructure fundamentally. The traditional paradigm of hardware-centric, file-based systems is moving aside to make way for new software-defined, object-based approaches.  In order for the industry to achieve the growth demanded to support these storage demands, we must strip out layers of inefficiency from legacy architectures and introduce a new approach optimized for scale-out application and data center needs.

With many businesses in the region transitioning to cloud-based storage platforms, we recently unveiled the Seagate Kinetic Open Storage platform that promises to simplify enterprise data management and lower total cost of ownership of the average cloud infrastructure by up to 50%.  It implements and enables the most efficient stack (devices, protocol, interface, software, systems) to optimize for current and future application demands, uniquely enables object-oriented applications to take direct advantage of storage, and fuels scale-out data center innovation. In doing so, it enables significant gains in performance, manageability and total cost of ownership (TCO).