Hifn inks distribution deal

California, USA: Hifn, the catalyst behind storage and networking innovation, today announced that it has signed a distribution agreement with Promark Technology, one of the country's top value added distributors for government resellers.

The agreement is for US-wide distribution of Hifn's Swarm Unified Storage Bundle, opening up wider market opportunities by deploying Hifn's award-winning Swarm iSCSI SAN and NAS software on industry standard server hardware.

The Swarm iSCSI SAN and NAS software has been widely praised by customers for its ease of use and comprehensive feature set, including a broad set of data management and data protection/business continuity tools that are typically extra cost add-ons with other vendors.

"iSCSI and unified storage has become an indispensable piece of our business and the storage platform of choice, especially for the SMB/SME market," said Dale Foster, President and CEO of Promark. "Hifn's Swarm Bundle gives our channel a high-value solution with Enterprise-class features that is available in an open, standard off the shelf storage platform."

"We could not have found a better distribution partner than Promark to help us deliver our Swarm Bundle," said Albert Sisto, Chairman and CEO of Hifn. "Their experience with iSCSI technology, the national network of storage resellers and expertise in federal government sales provide Hifn with a distribution powerhouse, expanding the opportunities for Hifn's iSCSI SAN and NAS software just as the market for iSCSI storage is reaching critical mass."

Hifn's simple-to-implement and easy-to-use Swarm Storage Bundle delivers a robust feature set that targets the mid market and continues the company's mission to protect sensitive data. Swarm is a unique software solution with support for both iSCSI SAN and NAS storage protocols within Microsoft Windows environments. Unlike most iSCSI implementations, Hifn Swarm includes a wide range of features for storage management and data availability services designed to simplify and reduce storage management overhead and improve data security and availability for customers.

All storage management -- including administration of multiple deployed appliances -- is handled via an intuitive web-based GUI. Swarm provides broad volume management features with support for on-the-fly volume and capacity expansion and enhanced data availability with Multi-Path I/O support, providing dual data paths for active/active access to storage. Advanced data protection is included by enabling VSS-consistent snapshots and volume-based remote replication to facilitate disaster recovery and business continuity operations. Hifn's innovative unified software also includes integrated backup, enabling users to backup directly from SAN-based storage, greatly reducing the backup window and eliminating backup traffic from the LAN.

Hifn's Swarm Storage Bundle also includes the company's Express DS 250/255 data encryption card. Designed for fast and efficient OEM integration, the DS 250/255 is a high-performance, low-power data security accelerator card that provides advanced AES 256 encryption for sensitive data while meeting the standards for regulatory compliance, such as HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley.