American Megatrends: Driving Storage Innovations

Sridharan Mani
Director & CEO
American Magatrends India

With a strong focus on Embedded, Storage and GPS Tracking Solutions, American Megatrends drives innovations in the computing world. In India, the company mainly focusses on enterprise products and solutions segment. In the enterprise segment, the company addresses the enterprises with storage, among others. It is a provider of Ethernet-based storage. According to a study, worldwide external disk storage systems Factory Revenue increased 2.3% during the fourth quarter of 2012 and 4.7% for the full year. The SAN market was said to have grown by 13.4% year on year. Globally, the company has been awarded around 50 patents for data storage innovations. 

This 27-year-old company is the world’s largest BIOS firmware vendor - AMIBIOS is deployed in more than 65% of all computers worldwide. AMI’s remarkable work in R&D and in innovation has gained more than 200 patents globally, in its name.

American Megatrends has a robust channel base which deals in the company’s enterprise-class products. The company looks forward to adding more partners. With more than 150 registered partners, the company conducts multi-city events, wherein it addresses the requirements of the solution providers and system integrators. VARINDIA talked to Sridharan Mani, Director & CEO, American Megatrends India, to know about the company’s storage and channel plans. 

What has been American Megatrends doing on the storage front?

Last year, American Megatrends had launched StorTrends 1301i in India. A 1U IP-SAN (Internet Protocol Storage Area Network) and NAS (Network Attached Storage) storage appliance built on Intel architecture with StorTrends iTX Data Storage Software, StorTrends 1301i is an ideal storage solution for small offices and SMEs. 

What are the differentiating factors for StorTrends 1301i?

StorTrends 1301i offers support for both block and file data transfer over the existing Ethernet network and is a cost-effective, scalable, and easily deployable storage appliance. Combining IP-SAN and NAS functionality into one single platform, StorTrends 1301i comes with 4 hot-swappable drive bays with advanced SATA support, as well as highly distinguishing software features. Powered by Dual-dialect StorTrends iTX software, StorTrends 1301i’s support for iSCSI (Internet Small Computer System Interface) enables block applications like Microsoft Exchange and Oracle to be deployed or stored on the same server as the traditional file services and storage. StorTrends 1301i is designed with features for advanced storage management such as High Availability, Advanced Snapshots, Volume Replication, and Failover.

How do you differentiate disaster recovery?

For improved reliability and disaster prevention, the StorTrends 1301i features a redundant power supply, as well as Smart UPS support, which allows the appliance to seamlessly switch over to UPS power in the event of a power failure and initiate a graceful shutdown. StorTrends 1301i has IPMI 2.0 (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) compliance for remote management of the appliance.

What about your Service Support?

Our solutions are engineered from start to finish in a manner that the customer does not have to worry on the services part of it. Apart from regular 24x7 support, this is another way the company ensures that these cover all areas right from development to execution and not just from the post-sales perspective.

How do you empower your partners?

First and foremost, we address the needs of the partners through our partner programmes which are in place where we basically train the partners not only on the product but also all the concepts related to storage. The partners can get 24/7 online support. More importantly, we give incentives to our partners more than our competitors. 

edit@varindia.com