CommVault tweaking VAR training, margins

CommVault says that it’s making changes to two key components of its channel partner program in response to partner feedback. First, says Mark Conley, the company’s director of North American channels, it’s tweaking its margins to improve profitability for smaller VARs. Second, it’s modifying its sales accreditation program. Continued »

How VARs can leverage the cloud

Cloud storage is a topic that’s generating a lot of discussions within the storage community, as companies look for ways to manage data growth, save money, save time, etc. The problems IT people have are pretty familiar, but frankly, cloud storage isn’t a silver bullet for those problems. Some customers are putting some data in the cloud, but they’re really just sticking their toes in the water.

So if cloud storage isn’t exactly a “killer app” (yet), what can the cloud do for VARs? Continued »

Ctera launches partnership with VAD Interwork

Ctera Networks this week announced its distribution deal with Interwork Technologies, a value-added distributor for security services. Interwork is adding Ctera’s Cloud-Attached Storage devices to its S-Sphere suite of managed security services. S-Sphere includes products from a number of other vendors.  

Liran Eshel, CEO of Ctera, said that Interwork is adding Ctera’s offering as a data protection component for its security services suite. Continued »

Customers might not ready for cloud technology, but they are ready for cloud benefits

There’s no shortage of talk around cloud storage. Vendors and customers alike seem to enjoy speculating on what “the cloud” means to the future of storage — and maybe to their futures as well. In theory, cloud storage could be described as a movement toward some technical ideals that have been around for a long time, such as storage that’s infinitely scalable, immediate, cost-effective, paid for as it’s used, delivered online, always optimized (no tuning, balancing, etc.), purchased as a service rather than an asset and managed by a provider rather than an organization’s own staff. Most descriptions also include the benefits of an enterprise-level infrastructure — including the security, support and processes that usually accompany the “big iron” — that’s available to smaller users.

In practice, cloud storage products that end users buy (and VARs sell) are all over the map. IT organizations can buy the services (storage capacity) themselves from a cloud storage provider, or software to set up a cloud on their own hardware, or the hardware to run a cloud on — or the whole thing as a turnkey solution.

While there are many interpretations of the cloud, instead of getting wrapped around the axle about what the cloud is and how it may eventually replace data storage as we now know it, you should talk about what parts of the technology have benefits that people can enjoy now. More important to a VAR than the definition of cloud storage, per se, is what you can get out of a cloud storage discussion. In practice, most end users aren’t really buying a lot of cloud storage — at least not yet. But users are intrigued by the benefits that cloud storage might enable and are interested in seeing these features in the products they do buy. 

Rather than looking for opportunities to sell “storage in the cloud,” for now look for ways to leverage the interest users have in these concepts. For example, show customers outsourced solutions where users pay a fee for a service instead of buying and running a box. Or, bring in storage solutions that can make the infrastructure scalable, feature-rich and more economical. How about solutions that can optimize resource allocation and enable users to fully utilize assets and reduce cost? In the next post we’ll look at some examples of technologies that deliver the purported benefits of the cloud and that you can show customers.

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Unified storage company Reldata goes channel-only

Reldata, which has a new CEO in Steven Murphy (recently of Plasmon), is abandoning its hybrid distribution model and will rely only on channel partners to sell its unified storage systems. Lanie Kruger, channel/business development director, said that the company has found that it’s more cost-effective to sell to its target customers – midmarket IT organizations — through its channel partners rather than via an internal sales force. Continued »

EMC/Cisco/VMware alliance: It’s OK for Tucci to choose the wine

I recently read Beth Pariseau’s excellent report on the EMC/Cisco/VMware Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) alliance, and I’m not sure what to make of this news. On one hand, it’s always a little disconcerting when the biggest players get together and form an even bigger player, especially when their objective is to provide integration — something most storage VARs rely on to stay in business. But this may not be all bad for VARs. Continued »

Storage magazine survey: File virtualization is on the ‘to-do list’

In Storage magazine’s Purchasing Intentions survey of hundreds of storage buyers, file virtualization made the list of the top 10 techs that respondents said are on their list of current projects. More than 50% of respondents said they have already implemented or evaluated file virtualization this year or have plans to do so.

File virtualization, like block storage virtualization, abstracts the users from the physical storage by inserting a logical layer between clients and file servers. Continued »

Storage magazine survey: Increased interest in storage virtualization

Storage magazine’s most recent Purchasing Intentions survey, which I mentioned in my last post, showed increased interest in storage virtualization, even though it still lags behind server virtualization in most shops. Survey respondents cited difficulty and expense as the main reasons for its slower adoption. For VARs, these are magic words, as complexity drives demand for integration and discourages end users from the do-it-yourself path. Likewise, concerns about expense mean users should be open to alternative solutions that can save money over their existing disk solution.

According to the survey, 61% of respondents have virtualized some of their block storage, and 18% have all their block storage virtualized. Continued »

SRM company enters market with SaaS offering

Storage Fusion, a U.K.-based startup with roots in storage analytics, has an SRM SaaS offering that VARs and MSPs may be interested in. The company’s master plan is to have a thousand customers for its flat-rate Storage Resource Analysis product in two years. SRA can either be hosted by MSPs in their data center, or VARs and integrators can resell the services provided by another hosting company. (Storage Fusion doesn’t host the software itself.)  

Continued »

Storage magazine survey: Time to outsource recovery?

The results from Storage magazine’s most recent Purchasing Intentions survey brings up a couple things that should interest storage VARs. While there is still a recession on and budgets are certainly tight, opportunities are there. As an example, the average storage budget allocation is broken out as follows:

                39%   Disk hardware

                14%   Staff

                13%   Maintenance fees

                12%   Storage software [including backup software]

                8%     Storage network hardware

                7%     Professional services

                7%     Removable media [tapes] Continued »