LAN Systems signs Exabyte

Westcon Group subsidiary LAN Systems has beefed up its storage portfolio, signing an agreement to distribute Exabyte’s tape backup, restore and archival systems to SMB resellers.

Under the agreement, LAN would sell Exabyte’s range of tape drives including LTO, VXA packet drives, autoloader and library products for data protection automation.

LAN joins ACA Pacific, Datastor Australia and T Data on Exabyte’s distribution list.

Wendy O’Keefe, general manager at LAN Systems, said the addition of Exabyte to the distributor’s storage arsenal supports the company’s EMC storage strategy. Exabyte gear complemented EMC storage products which included Legato and Dantz’s data management software and related services.

“Exabyte have got a good brand in the market, have multiple channels and products we can sell alongside EMC,” O’Keefe said.

“There are a few more [vendors] that we’ll add as we continue to evolve it [LAN’s storage division],” she added.

It had been 12 months since the distributor launched a storage practice and O’Keefe said LAN had met its objectives with EMC but wouldn’t elaborate further.

Richard Giddey, country manager for Exabyte in Australia and New Zealand, said LAN’s national presence was a key factor in its appointment.

“Our channel has been state-based and we were looking for someone with national coverage and focused on the SMB space, he said.

He said the company was seeing solid growth in the automation products through distribution channels while its tape drive business was moving over predominantly to OEM channels with partners such as IBM, Fujitsu and Lynx.

IDC published a report in April 2005 which found that Exabyte grew its market share in the low end automation market from five percent in calendar 2003 to 18 percent in 2004.

O’Keefe said Exabyte was a perfect fit for SMB customers that needed a disk-to-tape strategy for simple backup or archiving data or from a disk-to-disk-to-tape solution for fast restore/archiving at a lower price/point.