News
11 May 2010
Zenith Infotech to launch new division and innovative On-premise private Cloud appliance at Channel Expo 2010
Zenith Infotech Ltd is to launch a new division, Zenith Infotech Europe (Stand 565), at Channel Expo this May. The announcement will also coincide with the launch of Smart Style Office, an innovative on-premise private cloud appliance aimed at SMB’s eager to reduce IT complexity and costs.
Zenith Infotech Europe has emerged from the channel business of A-Server who has provided technical development, sales and support for Zenith Infotech in Europe for the last 2 years. A-Server is also the developer of the Smart Style Office Appliance which provides simple provisioning and management of virtual servers and desktops complete with pre-configured networking, distributed storage, backup, hardware-based, power management with a high availability setup
“Virtualisation and cloud are the two fastest growing areas of IT at the moment,” explains Arvid Fossen, Director of Product Management and Marketing for Zenith Infotech Europe, “But the reality is that VMware is still expensive to deploy and relatively complex for the SMB market and some applications are still best served from on premise equipment.”
“Even with faster broadband access, many organisations would lose productivity by moving all applications into a cloud environment and still would have the associated cost and complexity of managing desktop PC’s - Smart Style Office solves many of these problems in a single, preconfigured device!”
The Zenith Infotech Smart Style Office appliance includes three clustered host servers and is designed to support a small business starting with a combination of 5 virtual servers and/or virtual 25 desktops and can be expanded. Scalability is achieved by simply adding one or more host servers to the cluster to create additional CPU or storage capacity as needed.
The advised configuration consists of 3 Physical Servers provide 24 Ghz of CPU capacity, 30 GB of memory, 7 TB of data storage, 64GB SSD for performance and caching. Each resource can be allocated in varying quantities to different virtual servers or desktops for efficient usage of IT resources.
Smart Style Office is designed for high availability and low maintenance in environments with limited on-site IT staff. Each unit has dual Gigabit Ethernet connections, fully redundant power supplies with a Racktivity Power Distribution and Rack Controller to ensure reliability.
Within the entry-level three node appliance, multi hard drives or even a full node can fail with no data loss to the built-in data integrity configuration that spreads redundant data evenly distributed across multiple drives and nodes. The built-in self healing technology will auto rebuild failed drives and backup data across all machines in real-time.
Management is simplified with all virtual servers, terminals and Smart Clients created and deployed by a simple user interface. Smart Style Office has a complete remote management and reporting engine to allow SMB to outsource management of the unit to a trusted managed service provider.
“Smart Style Office will be sold entirely through the channel” explains Fossen, “The device is effectively an entire IT infrastructure in a single box, just add to a network and it is ready to run. For our channel partners, they now have the ability to deliver a wider range of managed services on top of Smart Style Office and generate good recurring revenue including low touch remote monitoring and management services.”
Smart Style Office is sold under the same philosophy as the Backup and Monitoring products from Zenith Infotech, setting cost price low towards partners so that they can generate good margins out of it while still being very competitive. Zenith Infotech Europe will be demonstrating Smart Style Office at its stand 565 along with several other products created by companies that are related through the Cloud Innovation Center Incubaid in Gent, Belgium:
- Amplidata, an unbreakable Petabyte range Storage platform (www.amplidata.com)
- Racktivity, an innovative power distribution and rack controller appliance (www.racktivity.com)
- DAAS.com, a Private Cloud Datacenter aimed at ISVs and SAAS providers (www.daas.com)
- Zenith Infotech Europe backup and monitoring solutions for channel partners
“With the launch of Zenith Infotech in Europe, we now join a trusted single brand with a channel community of over 5000 resellers active in Europe and the US,” comments Fossen, “We are 100% channel focused and our product portfolio offers solutions that extend from the desktop, through to the local datacenter and all the way out to the cloud – all backed up by large 24/7 network operations and support centre.”
Zenith Infotech Europe will start life with around 200 channel partners in the UK through its existing A-Server Backup and Data Recovery Partner programme and is actively recruiting new partners for its new Smart Style Office appliance.
“We are growing fast in Europe, we have an extremely innovative product portfolio and a 100% commitment to the channel at a time of great change within IT,” comments Fossen, “By focusing on disruptive and industry changing technology areas, we aim to help our channel partners stand out from the crowd with products and services that are truly ground breaking and offer new streams of revenue.”
About Channel Expo 2010
Channel Expo 2010 will be held on 12-13 May 2010 and this year has moved to the National Hall, Olympia, London. It provides resellers with the opportunity to explore and compare a vast array of products and partners, while offering vendors and distributors the opportunity to meet the whole industry in one place, at one time
About Zenith Infotech Europe
Zenith Infotech Europe is the European division of the international group Zenith Infotech Ltd. The European headquarters is based in Belgium, operated by A-Server NV. Zenith Infotech has a focus on providing standardized and scalable managed IT services to the reseller channel. The service is oriented exclusively to the SME segment.
The porfolio of services is a perfect complement to the activities of the IT reseller. These services are offered through the network operations center in Mumbai, India, where about 600 people support the managed services infrastructure and global customer portfolio.
The services include backup and business continuity solutions for SMEs, Monitoring and Management services for desktops and servers, and more recently the management of an overall SME IT environment via Style Smart Office, an innovative cloud computing solution for network computing. 40.000 sites currently managed by IT resellers 4.000.
More information can be found on www.zenithinfotech.eu
About Incubaid
Incubaid starts & advises companies in the internet (hosting) & IT infrastructure software space (backup & storage software, datacenter management software, hosting and cloud computing).
It has expertise in building and growing IT High Tech Startups, and helps them to raise funds and build a development organization (how to get to reliable software products).
For this purpose, it has 200+ man years of experience with technology startups and an extensive international network that gives access to funding, potential business partners and early adopter markets.
More information can be found on www.incubaid.com
