Acer is to market Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) WMS100 storage area network (SAN) and AMS200 network attached-storage (NAS) devices under its own brand, though UK customers will not see Acer-HDS equipment until the second half of 2007.

Acer believes that bundling SAN equipment with its servers can boost its sales in Europe and elsewhere. HDS will use Acer’s significant channel presence to push its products into smaller businesses, though demand for SAN capacity running into terabytes may be low in this sector of the market.

John Roberts, Acer’s server business unit director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, argued that many smaller organisations want to implement SANs to accommodate and manage growing volumes of data.

“It depends on how you define a small business. Those with around 500 employees are definitely looking to consolidate their storage, and a SAN is the technical implementation of that, whereas smaller organisations are more likely to be adding network-attached storage here and there,” Roberts said.

HDS’ TagmaStore WMS100 is a modular storage enclosure that can house a maximum of 41TB of Sata hard disk capacity, and comes with either iSCSI or Fibre Channel (FC) interfaces.