Newisys no longer, OEM wants to be a Viking in storage

Sanmina Corp. subsidiary Newisys recently plunged into enterprise storage with an NVMe all-flash system. In a bid to extend its presence in storage, Newisys is now called Viking Enterprise Solutions, a re-branding that closely ties it to Sanmina sister subsidiary Viking Technology.

Viking Enterprise Solutions (VES) also introduced the NDS-41020 4U disk array. The JBOD (just a bunch of disk) platform allows vertical scaling with 102 SAS or SATA HDDs.

The vendor also released for the first time a set of application-specific software packages for high-performance computing, media and entertainment, and distributed RAID management.

Newisys was founded in 2000 as an OEM supplier of storage technology.  Array vendors would take the Newisys hardware and add their own software and bezel.

Electronics manufacturing contractor Sanmina acquired Newisys in 2003 and operated it as a stealth engineering group until the August launch of the NSS-2556 NVMe array.

The VES branding reflects a wider range of capabilities that include branded hybrid storage, cold storage and high-capacity servers, said Dan Liddle, a vice president of marketing for the vendor’s servers and storage.

“Viking is the Sanmina brand for components, memory and SSDs. We’ve branched out in recent years and are broadening our brand and strategic portfolio,” Liddle said.

The VES NDS-41020 is geared for performance and availability, including field-replaceable units, hot-swapppable drives and two I/O modules, fans and power supplies. No components are active on the device’s midplane, which helps to eliminate any single failure point. The array can zone drives in four predefined zoning schema.

Liddle said customers can request customized VES arrays that integrate their preferred storage vendor’s operating system and other third-party software.

“The focus is around density, capacity and overall price per gigabyte,” Liddle said.

The VES roadmap includes hyper-converged infrastructure built with Viking memory hardware and also OEM gear from other major vendors, but Liddle did not give a timetable.