Isilon urges AV channel to adopt clustered kit

Isilon has made a bid for audiovisual market attention with a plug-and-play system

Steve Jenkins: Resellers do not need specialist knowledge to sell this technology.

Isilon has urged audiovisual (AV) resellers to take on its plug-and-play clustered storage platforms to solve the problem of unstructured data created by AV systems.

Isilon has claimed it has created a system, the IQ range, which is easy to install, but promises massive margins. Steve Jenkins, general manager of the UK division, claimed last week that this is the first time vertical market resellers would be able to sell a high-value storage product without having any specialist knowledge of storage technology.

“The beauty of this product is that it is easy to install and manage,” he said. “You can build up your network by increments. Kodak started with 250 terabytes, now it has six petabytes. You can snap on a six terabyte unit and configure it in an hour.”

There is a massive boom for Isilon’s products in industries where unstructured and AV data is created, said Jenkins. So Isilon’s channel recruitment drive will concentrate on resellers with market knowledge of industries that use CAD CAM, MP3s, jpgs and video. Resellers involved in oil and gas, the NHS, manufacturing, finance and pharmaceuticals are also targets.

Keith Gee, managing director of AV VAR Gee Broadcast Systems, confirmed that the product was easy to sell. “We are experts in writing software primarily, and we have dealt with more complicated storage systems up until now,” he said.
“Customers do not have to employ a storage engineer to look after it, and that is very important to people these days,” he said.