How storage resellers are escaping the commodity trap

Many customers are opting for a blended approached, says Jason Rylands, national data centre architect at distributor DPSA. He points out, for instance, that many legacy applications do not virtualise well.

“It’s not a case of ‘cloud or nothing’. Instead it is more a case of hybrid. There is definitely room in the channel to provide services as customers make the journey to the cloud and after they have gone to the cloud.”

Barracuda’s Romans agrees: “Instead of competing against the cloud, resellers could take a hybrid approach, which often works best with a physical appliance capable of replicating to the cloud. This gives customers the benefits of having the cloud for off-site storage, with the efficiency of an on-site appliance for fast backup and recovery windows.”

The final piece of the current storage puzzle is the growing importance of flash; Gartner describes flash as a fundamentally disruptive technology. 

EMC’s ANZ director of technology, Matt Zwolenski, agrees. “Flash storage technologies were the biggest disruptive force in the information infrastructure industry in 2013, and we see it only accelerating in 2014.”

He says the reason why it’s so disruptive is that it has a major impact on the two things that matter most to customers: first, lowering cost; and second, improving the end user experience. 

“For example, with virtual desktop infrastructure projects, flash architectures allow desktop users to experience better performance, enable features they would normally deactivate, and will generally be five to 10 times more efficient in capacity, power, cooling and space. Ultimately, this can lead to significant cost savings for the business and a successful VDI project.”

The flash space has been hotting up, with a bevy of players now active in Australia (see boxes). Flash has also been a contentious space for EMC and its younger rival, Pure Storage – not just commercial rivals, the two vendors are in court over an intellectual property dispute.

Bloomfield notes that in the enterprise space, NGage will typically lead with flash first. “We work with Pure Storage and they are fairly new in Australia. The ease of use and the way they can compress data means customers save money on management and time and power and cooling as well. You can reduce one rack down to a fifth of a rack and you save money right there just on that.”

Gartner’s Chandrasekaran adds: “In the past, to improve performance you had to add more spinning disks – but thanks to flash today you can decouple performance from capacity.” 

HEAR FROM LEADING FLASH RESELLERS:

• Flash player: VMTech & NetApp

• Flash player: Remora & Violin Memory

• Flash players: Advent One & IBM

• Flash players: BEArena & Nutanix

• Flash players: Cloud Solutions Group & Nimble Storage