Distributor GE Access of Boulder, Colo., has inked a deal with T-RAX Systems of Irvine, Calif., to distribute the company’s line of Sun server enclosures to the Canadian market place.
T-RAX offers 74.25-inch rack enclosures specifically for Sun server products, but according to Will Sumners,
vice president, enterprise solutions and Livermore Logistics Center for GE Access, the T-RAX product line will also work with Extreme and Hitachi Data Systems products as well. GE Access will also construct these solutions and ship them to its reseller base in Canada or to the reseller’s customer location.
“We have several vendors, which offer additional products to augment our offerings and T-RAX is that kind of offering. Resellers need a product like this which isn’t in their core offering, but comes with high margin returns,” Sumners said.
Resellers can expect anywhere from 15 to 20 per cent or higher margins on T-RAX enclosures depending on the type of server solutions they are building.
The T-RAX line while not a specific hardware or software solution, it is still consistent to GE Access’s four core practice areas, Sumners said. Those practices are Sun, storage, networking and security.
“We continue to round out those offerings to support the path we go down on, which is to build out our vendor offerings in Canada and in the U.S.,” he said.
Sumners was not concerned about Sun Microsystems’ increasingly low-end server direction as it pertained to T-RAX.
“I do not think that is in any way different than what Sun provides from its workstations on up to its enterprise servers. This (T-RAX) is really another way to make a different form factor and to make it scalable and round off their offerings. It’s a slightly different flavour,” he said.
Sumners wouldn’t predict how well T-RAX will do in the Canadian market. He said it depended on server sales. Enclosures are a “horizontal play,” he said, and that will attract server sales, Extreme sales or stackable offerings from other GE Access vendor partners.
GE Access has already begun communicating the T-RAX opportunity to its Canadian reseller base.
“We are the exclusive distributor of T-RAX and we have an inside-out push with this. All of our inside sales team have made calls to all the resellers and informed them on T-RAX and what it can do. We also sent out a customer newsletters and fax blast. This has been heavily communicated,” Sumners said.
T-RAX is versatile enough for housing servers, storage devices, networking equipment and PCs. The enclosures are manufactured in an ISO-9001-certified facility, the company said. GE Access also offers kits and accessories for the enclosure, as well as optional NetBotz environmental monitoring equipment.
