5 Ways To Make Your Client's Cloud Storage Meet Today's Requirements

By Kevin Liebl, Vice President of Marketing, Zadara Storage, Provider of Enterprise Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS)

Few enterprise technology sectors have seen such transformation as the data storage sector in the past few years. Virtualization, the shift to cloud-computing architectures, and software-defined storage with its advanced remote management capabilities have changed an industry known for requiring CAPEX purchases of costly hardware that guestimate the storage needed five years from the purchase — primarily to a software-driven industry. The utility computing model finally has arrived for storage as well as computing, and channel partners are looking for a way to get on board.

In the data storage world, there are two principles that have been true since the early days of computing. 

1. The demand for capacity continues to grow at exponential rates. 
2. The value of the data stored continues to increase.

This creates a clear market opportunity for enterprise-grade storage in cloud computing architectures, whether that cloud is public, private or hybrid — and whether it is one of the big public clouds like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, or hosted by smaller regional cloud service providers. Enterprise buyers want cloud elasticity, scalability, and economies with all of the enterprise grade features they have come to rely on.  However, they want a solution without the problems associated with a shared resource — as is often the experience in the cloud. Buyers are also looking for enhanced features such as remote management and charge-back capabilities. 

As a result, pure OPEX storage has tremendous appeal — both for cash-strapped SMBs as well as larger enterprises that demand the most for their budget. Buying storage as-a-service just makes sense, when most other software is provisioned and paid for as a service, too.

With the old mantra of “you never got fired for buying XXX” (insert your favorite big name) no longer prevailing, the channel has even more options for shifting its business to an annuity stream while meeting today’s storage needs. Here are five ways to make sure your portfolio includes the enterprise storage capabilities that are most in demand.

1. Leverage Both Multitenancy And Resource Isolation. Multitenancy is a great benefit of cloud architectures. However, the downside of multitenancy is the so-called “noisy neighbor” problem, where on application can drain resources and impact the performance of another application. Look for resources that are isolated, such as disks and SSDs that are dedicated to your customer alone.
2. Make Sure Your Customers Don’t Give Up Functionality When Moving To The Cloud. Users should not have to compromise to move to the cloud. Make sure that the solution you offer has a full set of enterprise-class features that would match any tier one, enterprise-grade storage vendor. Expecting a user to move to the cloud, but not have snapshots, replication, mirroring, support for clusters, data encryption, and others will not be a competitive solution.
3. Look For Solutions That Treat Cloud Storage Just Like A SAN (Storage Area Network) Or Network-Attached Storage (NAS). That’s a seemingly tall order but a new class of solution is emerging that enables this, and with the same service level agreements (SLAs) that enterprises have come to expect from traditional hardware vendors.
4. Have A Plan For Clients To Achieve Scalability From Terabytes To Petabytes. Offer solutions to customers that enable a variety of configurations by combining different storage media (SSDs [solid state drives] and HDDs [hard disk drives] of varying kinds and sizes) — as well as controllers of varying performance — to meet cost, performance, and capacity requirements. That way, as needs change, customers can add or remove performance and capacity as-needed, non-disruptively, and costs structure will adjust automatically. 
5. Preserve Options For Public, Private And Hybrid Clouds. Industry analysts cite a 27 percent growth in hybrid cloud solutions sales through 2019 (Markets and Markets), yet channel partners need the flexibility to offer storage suitable for private and public cloud applications, too. Make sure your storage portfolio includes solutions for all three approaches — and if the same solution can support all three, even better.

The market opportunity for sophisticated, higher-margin storage purchases also extends beyond big enterprises and includes many SMBs with data-intensive businesses that have outsized storage and compute requirements. In fact, smaller companies are often less change resistant and more interested in the value of an OPEX solution than larger companies.

As the market begins to transition from a traditional, rigid CAPEX model to a flexible OPEX model, savvy businesses will be able to grow their revenue streams with the smoothing effect of an as-a-Service annuity stream. There’s seldom been a better time for the channel to ride the wave as the transition occurs.  
 

Kevin Liebl is vice president of marketing for Zadara Storage, provider of enterprise Storage as a Service (STaaS) solutions.  He is based in Irvine CA.