From The Expert Feature Article
June 17, 2013

Cloud Backup: MSPs Flush with Choice, Part 3


Note: this is the Third part of a three-part series. Click here for part 1, and here for part 2.

A D2D2C Education

Okay, so now you know that GFI, TwinStrata (News - Alert), CTERA and Asigra all love D2D2C and hope to replace tape. Well, business continuity vendor Datto feels the exact same way.

Datto is working the partner angle has some 5,000 partner moving its products.

Datto wants its partners to have more arrows in the old MSP quiver and has an array of new tools such as custom marketing, training resources, and a beefed-up partner portal for MSP partners.

“Our partners are the life blood of our business and without them we wouldn't be able to function. Our new Partner Portal has been in development for over a year and is built with direct input from our partners. We are excited to see how partners put these tools to work, to grow their businesses and help their end clients succeed,” said Austin McChord, CEO and founder of Datto, Inc.

ATScloud Seeks Hybrid Partners

ATScloud is another hybrid believer. To help realize its vision the cloud company hooked up Exagrid who brings the hardware to the hybrid table. Together they have a service that each can now offer.

The duo already has a customer for the relatively new service. “We’re very pleased with the ability to have our backup data offsite and online at the same time. And the pay-as-you-go model made a lot of sense for us, giving us the ability to easily expand as data grows,” remarked John Rowe, data/information systems engineer for North Central Texas Trauma Regional Advisory Council. “Offsite tape can be a nightmare, and our major goal was having a real-time offsite backup copy for redundancy that we can easily pull back across the WAN in case our primary site went down.”

Big Gun Pulls Cloud Trigger

If we asked who was the undisputed storage market leader, you’d probably come up with three letters – EMC (News - Alert).

While EMC makes gobs of cash selling hardware, it has a crystal ball like its competitors, and can see the cloud future rather clearly.

Here EMC relies on three more letters, MSP, to move clients to both cloud and virtual environments (you do remember that EMC owns VMware, don’t you?).

Recently EMC signed up Scotland’s iomart Group plc to the EMC Velocity Service Provider program. “We have been working with iomart for a number of years as a customer and are now delighted to welcome them to the Velocity Service Provider Program this year as they continue to grow their portfolio around differentiated and innovative public and private cloud options powered by EMC technologies,” noted Ross Fraser, vice president of EMEA Global Alliances for EMC.

iomart uses EMC’s Avamar deduplication and backup software to drive its Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) solution.

Infrascale Goes Private

If you are tired of all these vendors moving storage to the public cloud, get a load of Infrascale.

The company already sells its SOS (News - Alert) backup for clouds. The company just recently announced a version that MSPs can white label and install on-premises as a private managed offering.

Infrascale says the MSPs and other partners saw a demand for this style of deployment.

“In 2012, we saw an increase in customers wanting to take advantage of our software, but to have the control over the cloud,” said Ken Shaw, CEO of Infrascale.  “We've put over 100 man-years into development of our dashboard and our online backup application. Our partners now have the ability to take the power of that secure online backup application, re-brand for their firm, and host it in the data center of their – or their customers' – choice. Our objective has always been to integrate with our partners' businesses. Offering private cloud deployment of our application is yet another way to do just that.”





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