eChannelLine Daily News, February 11, 2003 | Written by Mark Cox

Nexsan Technologies has announced its ATAbaby, a version of successful ATAboy D2D solution focused specifically on the SMB market.

Nexsan is a disk-to-disk (D2D) storage specialist, which has interspersed itself into a market where they sell D2D for considerably less than traditional enterprise specialists like EMC, while still offering enterprise functionality. Their ATAboy storage arrays and InfiniSAN server software have been successful. Between November 2001 and November 2002, revenues grew 33 per cent monthly, and Diamond Lauffin, Nexsan's Senior Executive Vice President, said they expect 2003 will exceed that.

The ATAbaby is aimed at the SMB market, ranging from 320GB to 1TB in size, and priced for that market, at $2595 (US) for the former and $4295 for the 1 TB. “It’s subset of ATAboy,” Lauffin said. “It doesn’t have a hot-swappable controller like ATAboy 2, but the GUI, management, redundancy and alarm features are at the same level.

Laufflin said that they see ATAbaby fitting into three distinct niches. “It provides a competed automated RAID backup solution, replacing a tape drive,” he said. “It’s a very sophisticated backup solution, whose disk base is much easier to use than even a stand alone tape drive.”

The second niche, Laufflin said, is a sophisticated redundant RAID business for SMB or departmental business. The third is using it in a variety of areas as a hot-pluggable brick. “You can put two ATAboys in an environment and have them synched,” Lafflin said. It’s used where consumers don’t want to deal with control, companies like medical offices and small print graphics houses, who for $5000 want a completely redundant system.

Nexsan’s value-add, Laufflin said, is delivering premium value at an affordable price. “Budgetary constraints of so many businesses today are, we find, the first real motivating factor for companies to look at us. Then they find out about the quality benefits.” He pointed to an install they did for the RCMP, which was shopping for a couple TB of disk storage, and bought them when they found they could get 15 TB for the same price. “We have found that bringing true enterprise class features into an environment at substantially less cost, we have changed the paradigm of what end users are requesting.”

Even for small business, Laufflin said their solution will allow them to create a “black hole policy,” where they write something once and forget about it forever. “You don't have to delete for space. And you can get a RAID 5 device for less cost than standalone Super DLT,” he said.

Nexsan has expanded their channel in Canada as their business has grown. They now have three partners here, and expect to add three more integrators in Canada in 2003.