Open Storage: The sum of the parts

Avnet Technology Solutions is a leading distributor of networked enterprise storage solutions. Avnet's strengths come from a portfolio of carefully selected Vendor Partners, a highly successful and experienced team of storage professionals and a close trusted advisor relationship with many of Europe's most respected storage Business Partners. At the heart of Avnet's capabilities are enterprise-class storage solutions.

Enterprise-class storage and networking

Mike Darbyshire, EMEA Director Storage Product Business Group at Avnet Technology Solutions explains, "With the current explosion in storage requirements, the channel will find that end user customers demand intelligent management and protection of their information, not just the desire to throw more capacity at the problem of rapidly growing data. Business Partners will need to provide enterprise-class storage solutions and as such should look for a distributor able to provide ‘cradle to grave' support. With Avnet's exceptional customer service and technical experience we take the pain, complexity and risk out of delivering enterprise solutions, leaving Business Partners to focus on their core business - meeting the needs of end user customers."

Taking an intelligent approach to data storage

Taking an intelligent approach to data storage is central to the success of enterprise-class storage solutions. Intelligent data storage considers aspects such as where data resides, how it is stored, how it moves around, how it is managed, what use is made of it and most importantly how it is protected. Avnet's approach to intelligent data storage has been classified into four branches:

Data storage - where data resides and establishing the specific needs of every customer in terms of:

Storage Area Networks (SAN)
Network Attached Storage (NAS)
Backup
Archive

Data connectivity - infrastructure providing access to data. What standards to adopt and which technology to use:

Fibre Channel
iSCSI
Infiniband
10GB Ethernet
FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet)

Data management - technologies and solutions to deliver cost effective and efficient management of stored data. Data management includes:

Storage virtualisation
File Area Networks (FAN)
Content Addressed Storage (CAS)
Backup verification
De-duplication
Migration
Storage policy and firewall

Data security - an important and often overlooked final component of any intelligent data storage solutions approach. Security of data needs to be considered, while data is both at rest and in transit:

Encryption - data at rest and in transit
Backup management
Backup verification
Data replication

Using this model, Avnet's sales and technical teams make it easy and painless for Business Partners to sell sophisticated enterprise storage solutions to their customers.