Singapore new waters for Pihana

By Paul Montgomery

Hawaii-based Pihana Pacific is celebrating its three-way merger by taking its storage service provider business to Singapore in a deal with a local ISP.

Pihana, which merged earlier in October with US-based Web hosting startup Equinix and Asian managed IT infrastructure provider i-STT, will enter into a joint venture with Singapore-based broadband provider StarHub.

The combined business unit will offer network attached storage (NAS) services, as well as storage area network (SAN) using the Internet Protocol, utilising new technologies which replaced the need for Fibre Channel-based networking. The joint venture will also provide more traditional offline backup and restore facilities.

StarHub will provide the network connectivity, with customers being able to choose between its ATM network, and a wide-area Ethernet service called IP.Q which includes the ability to prioritise traffic via a technology called Multi-Protocol Label Switching, according to the company.

The storage service provider (SSP) industry in Singapore is already brisk, with competitors like Infovista, Spacedisk and Hitachi Data Systems in place. SSPs provide outsourced storage using Internet technologies to enable real-time backup and archiving of critical business data.

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