Netgear gets selective over storage channel

Vendor invites 15 handpicked UK VARs to sell sub-$10,000 enterprise storage kit and looks to identify more potential partners

Netgear is hunting an exclusive band of resellers to take its ReadyData suite of products to market after claiming the technology can offer end users enterprise-grade storage for less than $10,000 (£6,400).

The product is not being opened up to the breadth of the vendor's UK channel of about 5,000 partners, and 15 have initially been invited to sell the kit.

Jonathan Hallatt, Netgear's UK and Ireland VAR sales director, claimed that he will look to open discussions with more partners with the right credentials, but that the ReadyData channel will remain selective.

"We are looking for people who focus on SMBs," he said. "ReadyData is the start of many other things that are coming down the line and we need to get our channel ready."

ReadyData is billed as featuring native de-duplication, thin provisioning and unlimited snapshot functionality, and supports SATA, SAS and SSD disk drives. It can scale up to 180TB of capacity, but Netgear claims end-user pricing for 12 SATA drives should be somewhere below $10,000.

Drew Meyer, senior director of marketing at Netgear, claimed the technology will appeal across a variety of verticals as end users find limited budgets prohibit them from paying for big-name brands such as HP, IBM and EMC. Partners not receiving as much attention as they would like from the enterprise vendor behemoths will also be tempted into the Netgear fold, he added.

"Mid-market [firms] do not have the money or the budgets that they used to," he said. "We have made it much easier for channel partners to purchase [ReadyData]."