Sun casts cloud over Raid partner

UK provider of high-end storage systems Baydel has become the victim of a Sun Microsystems marketing campaign, despite the fact that the companies are OEM partners.

A recent mailer from Sun, advertising the StorEdge portfolio, displayed the slogan: 'Performance ... all you have to do is trade in your old SPARCStorage Array 100 or 200 series or your Baydel Raid array.' The leaflet offers discounts on the range for those who trade them in.

But Baydel was unhappy that its products were being presented as substandard to Sun's. The workstation giant buys Baydel product, rebadges it and then sells it on as its own brand.

Glenn Brackenridge, marketing manager at Baydel, said: 'We have had an arrangement with Sun's third-party division for more than four years and has sold more than 1,000 of our Raid systems.'

Brackenridge believed that Baydel had been singled out because of the large number of high-profile customers it has and that a move to Sun would not benefit customers.

But Chris Atkin, storage marketing manager at Sun, refuted the claims and said it was because of its relationship with Baydel that Sun made this offer.

'All we used to offer was the SPARCStorage array and the Baydel array. Now both ranges have been overtaken technologically, so we offered this deal,' he said.

'Baydel's products used to be complementary to our range, but they tend to overlap. Baydel has become less significant in our product portfolio and we would not offer it to new customers.'