Growing storage pressures on SMEs mean channel opportunities

Woking, Surrey: 1st October, 2012 - VAD Wick Hill today announced it is signing a contract with Imation, a global scalable storage and data security company, to distribute Imation’s scalable storage solutions for SMEs in the UK. Wick Hill already distributes Imation’s mobile security solutions.

Imation is at the forefront of developments in SME storage, utilising its experience at enterprise level to provide a range of ground-breaking SME solutions. With a ‘pay as you grow’ strategy, Imation solutions are easy to use flexible, scalable and cost- effective.

Ian Kilpatrick, chairman Wick Hill Group, commented: “SMEs are having to cope with ever-increasing volumes of data. Symantec’s recent State of Information Survey, conducted over 38 countries worldwide, found that SMEs expected their storage to increase by 178% over the next year.

“With 50 years of storage experience, Imation is an ideal partner for our VARs, both now and going forward. Imation solutions are enterprise-class with SME pricing, easily scalable, and offer options for multiple backup layers, as well as cloud storage. Imation also has innovative solutions for compliance and disaster recovery.

“In an area of high growth, but with competitive pressures, Imation enables the channel to deliver a range of solutions that will differentiate themselves and make good margins.”

Maurice Stewart-Ashley of Imation, said: “Imation believes in building long term relationships with our partners. As a 100% channel focused vendor, these relationships are essential to our success.

“Wick Hill, with over 30 years experience in the data security market, already brings a high level of technical and partner service expertise to the Imation mobile security portfolio. The company is perfectly placed to play a significant role in Imation’s aggressive scalable storage growth plans, and we very much look forward to partnering with the Wick Hill team.”

Imation scalable storage solutions

RDX® removable hard disk storage
RDX is a storage technology option that scales with a business, like tape, but offers the rugged reliability of disk.

RDX® Media Secure
Imation’s newest, recently released product for SMEs in its scalable storage division is RDX Media Secure, the world’s first removable hard disk drive with built in AES-256 data encryption and cryptographic erase capability.

Compatible with RDX Direct-Attach Docking Stations, Imation RDX Media Secure is an ideal solution for backup and recovery, data archiving and data shuttling. Activated through a one-time software driver installation, all data written to the RDX media is automatically encrypted.

Businesses that use Imation RDX Media Secure can easily manage data security and safely restore content. They are assured that data stored on RDX media is protected at rest and while the cartridge is being transported, which is often part of the cloud seeding process.

RDX®A8
The Imation RDX® A8 Hard Disk Storage Library is a scalable networked storage device that holds up to eight RDX cartridges of interchangeable capacities.

This multi-function device helps SMEs conduct high-performance backup, data protection, archiving, restoration and cloud-enabling applications.

The RDX A8 allows users to quickly back up and instantly access their crucial data. This gives them more operational agility and the ability to cost-effectively recover their data in the event of a disaster.

DataGuard data protection appliances
Imation DataGuard is a family of network attached storage (NAS) backup appliances, designed for SMEs.

The Imation DataGuard T5R and R4 are the world’s first purpose-built backup appliances to use hard disk drives, removable RDX® disk cartridges, replication, and cloud storage to provide up to four layers of data protection in a single backup infrastructure. They provide a cost-effective, NAS-based disk drive appliance, which combines data security, flexibility and simplicity.

Features include -

    Compatible with multiple-cloud storage APIs from Amazon S3, Dropbox and Open-Stack-based cloud providers.

    Media-agnostic, blending the best of hard drives, RDX drives (optional) and cloud storage to shorten backup windows and enable fast recovery.

    Non-disruptive, easily integrating into current backup frameworks and leveraging existing backup investments.

    Disaster tolerant, capable of making multiple copies of content as local online copies,  replicated copies, offline RDX copies (optional) and remote online (cloud) copies.