The Hindu : Business : AMI `surfaces' with Net storage products

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Nov 10, 2004

Business

Business

AMI `surfaces' with Net storage products

By Anand Parthasarathy

BANGALORE, NOV. 9. The only time the average personal computer user encounters the name `American Megatrends Inc' (AMI) is fleetingly for the second or so, it flashes across the monitor screen, when a service engineer tries to change the `BIOS' settings of the machine: the Basic Input Output System — that is, the tiny chunk of software that kicks in every time the PC is switched on and gets the operating system working.

In fact the AMI BIOS has been around from the day when the IBM PC was born, 20 years ago and has been `booting,' first the DOS, and now the Windows system, on close to half a billion machines worldwide.

Few, barring every leading PC maker in the world, who is its customer, know that the company, its `phoren-sounding' name, and base in the U.S. state of Georgia, notwithstanding, is much an Indian enterprise, founded by and still headed by, an IIT Madras graduate, Subramonian Shankar. So low key has been operations, that the company that has been operating from a six-acre, 125 engineer-strong export oriented unit off the Old Mahabalipuram road near Chennai for a decade, held its first ever media briefing here today. AMI `surfaced' after all these years under the hood of the PC so to speak, to announce the global availability of its new product — a networked storage product called StorTrends iTX, which claims for the first time, to use the Internet and the iSCSI protocol rather than a fibre optic channel to create a Storage Area Network (SAN) solution.

AMI India CEO Jayaram Krishnan explained that this `hybrid' between the competing SAN and NAS (Network Attached Storage) technologies was compellingly priced for India's small and medium sized companies.

The company which created much of the underlying software at its Chennai centre, operates another development group in Taiwan, where over 50 per cent of the local hardware players are its customers.

AMI India has also taken up the distribution of a `mesh' wireless networking offering from the US-based Strix Systems, the `Access One.' Strix Director of Business Development, Mat Holdrege, said the third generation Wireless-LAN-in-a-box solution was the only true wireless-mesh network and enabled the creation of ad hoc networks of 50 to 1,000 broadband users virtually within hours.

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