SecureData joins Brocade Elite

SecureData has joined the top rung of Brocade's partner program and will begin an aggressive marketing and education campaign promoting storage area network (SAN) architectures almost immediately.

SecureData managing director, Evan Penn, said the aim of the partnership was two-fold: "It allows us to go back to our SAN install base as well as uncover new opportunities in the SAN marketplace."

The first joint venture is a SAN health check bundle designed to increase businesses' confidence in SAN technology and get SecureData more thoroughly involved with its SAN clients.

The integrator wants to play a more active role in the selection of the switch used to bridge the servers and storage - influencing both the customers and the OEMs, such as Hewlett Packard, Network Appliance, EMC and Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), all of whose disk arrays SecureData sells.

"We're playing a much more active role in which switch sits inside these arrays," said Penn. "We want to exert our power of influence at the customer and the OEM level."

SecureData's new storage and server facility in Broadway, Sydney will become a demonstration centre for Brocade's new switching technology as it comes to market.

The integrator will maintain its credo of vendor neutrality and continue its relationships with Cisco and McData. However, Penn said Brocade's "phenomenal roadmap on new technology products this year" gave it an edge over the pack.

He said there were important developments on the horizon, such as iSCSI, which SecureData was obliged to prepare its customers for.

"iSCSI is going to have a major impact on storage and we have to do the best thing by our customers," said Penn.

In response to questions about the uptake of new storage technologies, Penn said SecureData has sold more than 100 SAN architectures to Top 1000 corporates in Australia over the past four years.

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