TNS ready to branch out with SAN plan

Reseller steps into storage as new players attack networking arena

Networking reseller Total Network Solutions (TNS) is branching out into storage to broaden the range of products it offers and offset lower margins in the increasingly competitive networking arena.

In the next 12 months the company will target existing customers in the public and private sectors with SANs and security components from SANDial, Emulex, StorAge and Decru.

"It's all about providing a balanced product portfolio," said Darren Brownfield, TNS's business development manager.

"We have network switches as a ballast product and legacy maintenance contracts. But also we have an established networking customer base that is being eroded day by day by new players. We needed to find a new technology to move forward."

According to Hamish Macarthur, managing director of storage analyst Macarthur Stroud, up to half of all of Europe's large to medium-sized companies have now implemented SANs.

This indicates that previous barriers to their adoption, including high capital equipment costs, poor interoperability between different vendors' products and a lack of Fibre Channel expertise in most IT departments, have now been overcome, he added.

"As far as sales of storage solutions go, the storage networking market is one of the more exciting growth areas. The main growth will come from distributed branch-office environments, rather than SMEs, although these will look like smaller SANs," Macarthur said.

The growing pressure on firms to store greater volumes of data, protect it more securely and provide fast, centralised information access and retrieval is proving an equally effective driver.

Brownfield said using a range of open-standard SAN products will help users avoid vendor lock-in from larger SAN suppliers and will mean SANs can integrate into existing storage systems more easily.

"SANdial provides one of most price-sensitive 2Gbps Fibre Channel SAN switches in the market, and cost is one of the predominant issues in the public sector," he said.

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