» VIEW ALL POSTS Oct 2 2009   3:38PM GMT

VAR perspective on Dataram’s XcelaSAN

Posted by: Sue Troy
SANs, Storage Channel, Sue Troy

Last week, SearchStorage.com ran a story written by my colleague Beth Pariseau about Dataram’s new caching appliance, XcelaSAN. The appliance sits between a Fibre Channel switch and a storage array, using flash and DRAM memory to speed performance. The company is targeting midsize businesses and departments within larger companies that have revenue tied to application performance.

I talked to one of Dataram’s resellers (they currently have five and are recruiting more): Scott Hansen, sales manager for the enterprise solutions group at Melillo Consulting, based in Somerset, N.J. Hansen said that the XcelaSAN makes more sense for midrange arrays – EMC’s Clariion or HP’s EVA, for example – than a high-end one.

 He said that Melillo’s target customers aren’t aligned with a particular vertical, though financial services companies are likely to be early adopters. A bigger factor in determining potential customers is the kinds of applications they’re trying to increase performance on—those with high-end databases and data warehouses, for example, could be good candidates for an XcelaSAN appliance.

Hansen said that a few of his customers are starting to pilot test the XcelaSAN and he expects to start closing  deals in the fourth quarter.

Dataram says XcelaSAN will be sold only through the channel.  For more info on the company’s partner program, check out its partner portal.