SageCloud and Avnet’s Rorke Global Solutions Sign OEM Agreement

August 27, 2013 — SageCloud, Inc., a leader in ultra-reliable storage systems at disruptive price points for archival, backup, and big data, and Rorke Global Solutionsa business unit of Avnet Embedded, a division of Avnet Electronics Marketing Americas, a business region of Avnet, Inc. (NYSE: AVT), today announced a strategic relationship to jointly bring to market new, petabyte-scale storage solutions for cold data. Rorke Global Solutions will deliver these storage system solutions, which integrate SageCloud’s powerful system software with open standards-based hardware and complimentary support services to custom-tailor solutions for specific data center environments.
Data storage is growing at 60% per year and consuming an increasing portion of constrained IT budgets. Industry experts believe that as much as 80% of that data qualifies as cold data — data that does not require active storage because it is written once and accessed infrequently. Large data consumers and industry groups, like the Open Compute Project (OCP) are promoting energy-efficient, open standards computing and hardware approaches that lower costs, reduce energy consumption and support scalability of cold data storage.
Rorke Global Solutions (RGS), together with SageCloud, will leverage OCP, field-tested open source software, and open hardware standards to deliver a highly reliable cold data storage system — on disk — that approaches the cost of storage on tape. The combined solution will be offered as an on-premise solution for IT storage professionals who are operating their own data centers or for ISP's seeking to improve the cost-efficiencies of their cold storage service offerings.
The solution is specifically designed for market segments that generate greater than one petabyte of cold data and that require backup, archiving and easy scale-out of their environments. Target groups include financial services, media and entertainment, and healthcare firms.
“By combining SageCloud’s software leadership and cold storage expertise with Avnet’s integration, certification, and service capabilities, we can offer our customers a best-in-class cold data storage system,” said John Salemme, vice president of OEM sales, Avnet Embedded. “The Rorke Global Solutions storage system powered by SageCloud is a natural extension of our storage portfolio, our storage knowledge-base, and our active support for the emerging Open Compute Project (OCP) standards.”
“With this relationship in place, information technology (IT) and internet service provider (ISP) customers will have solutions that dramatically lower their data storage costs,” said Jeff Flowers, SageCloud founder and CEO. “As data storage costs and requirements outstrip IT budgets, particularly as a result of big data platform adoption, affordable cold data storage is a must-have. We look forward to teaming with Rorke Global Solutions to meet this pressing industry need.”
Rorke Global Solutions storage systems, powered by SageCloud software, are currently in beta testing and will be generally available in the first quarter of next year. The RGS/SageCloud Priority Program will be accepting new Beta participants until mid September. For more information, please go to www.rorke.com or www.sagecloud.com.