Big Storage Opens Up

Page 1 of 2

Leading up to the May launch of the latest version of its top-of-the-line storage disk array system, Hewlett-Packard did something it had never done before: The Palo Alto, Calif.-based IT giant pretrained an assortment of its solution provider partners to enable more channel-related sales.

This might seem like a no-brainer, but historically HP has not heavily involved solution providers in the sale of its HP StorageWorks XP Disk Array line (version 24000 became available this month). As with other vendors, HP's high-end storage solutions traditionally have been sold direct or implemented by multibillion-dollar systems integrators such as Accenture and EDS. In HP's case, that's meant no prelaunch technical training or advance preview of product specifications.

That's changing, and not just at HP. Buoyed by technical advancements that have simplified these elaborate systems and driven by fast-evolving customer needs, more solution providers than ever are joining the ranks of high-end storage aficionados. Ask any manufacturer of these six-figure, heavy-metal disk arrays—IBM, EMC, Network Appliance, Hitachi Data Systems or HP—and they'll tell you that the upper echelon of storage systems are in demand by a broader demographic of customers, particularly in the midmarket. And that's where vendors need the channel the most.

"Today around the world, the majority of this business is and has been direct," says James Wilson, product manager for HP's XP line. "But we're making a concerted effort to increase volume through channel partners and working to that end to increase the percentage [they sell]."

One of the reasons that midsize VARs are now getting into the high-end storage game is that customers no longer need to be large corporations to have significant storage needs. Many midsize customers now run mission-critical applications, such as SAP, for manufacturing operations that must have constant uptime. Like multibillion-dollar corporations, they also need business continuity, disaster recovery, redundancy and enough storage to keep pace with an overflow of data while maintaining regulatory compliance.

"The need for 24/7 operations is not just for the biggest of the big companies anymore," says Dave Reinsel, a storage analyst at Framingham, Mass.-based IDC. "It doesn't take much to put a front-end to your business on the Internet to drive revenue, but all of a sudden downtime becomes directly relevant to the health of your company."

Scaling Up and Down

The storage needs of customers ranging from five to 60,000 users are keeping John DeRocker busy these days. DeRocker, senior vice president of sales and marketing and a co-founder of Nexus Information Systems, counts high-end storage solutions as a major part of his business, driven in large part by the need for tiered disaster-recovery storage, server consolidation and virtualization.

Nexus sells EMC's high-end Symmetrix line along with NetApp's FAS 6000. The solution provider has spent years building up its high-end storage practice, becoming something of a specialist that's often called in to implement major storage setups for other solution providers as part of Ingram Micro's VentureTech Network.

"When you're talking about storage and backup, it's all about scale these days," DeRocker says. "The $1 million EMC SAN we sell to the enterprise is the same as the $40,000 system for the mom-and-pop company."

Modularity and scale are hallmarks of NetApp's approach to the high end. The company introduced its FAS6000 series of disk arrays 18 months ago with a technology called FlexShare, which allows partners to partition the machines on a per-volume basis so that a single piece of infrastructure can handle a wide variety of workloads. The systems are aimed at providing support for mission-critical applications environments, such as Microsoft Exchange Server and SQL Server, and SAP.

NetApp has structured these storage systems so that partners can add onto the core infrastructure on an as-needed basis, keeping costs down and only selling customers what they need at any point in time. The other key element is not requiring customers to purchase another copy of the original high-end storage system in order to do the mirroring necessary to add a new capability. For example, if a customer needs to fire up disaster-recovery capabilities at some point after the original FAS6000 is deployed, NetApp allows partners to sell a lower-end storage system that provides the disaster recovery as a complement to the high-end system.

"Storage is half of the expense in IT, so you can't afford to buy gold-plated stuff everywhere," says Chris Bennett, vice president of core systems at NetApp. "Because it's a Lego-like approach, partners can package and address customer pain points in a cost-effective way, rather than pulling out the sledgehammer every time."

1 | 2 | Next >>

Tweet

   

More Storage