FusionStorm Delivers

Delivering technology solutions for over 14 years, FusionStorm has grown its business through internal expansion and acquisitions. The San Francisco-based company’s goal is to enable its customers to obtain competitive advantage through innovative IT solutions. That portfolio of solutions has grown over the years and now covers core areas such as systems and storage, enterprise software, networks, VoIP, and security. These practice areas are supported by a suite of managed and professional services and technology from industry leading vendors.

To support this broad range of solutions spanning multiple technology domains, FusionStorm leverages a four part methodology to ensure its offerings are optimized for the specific needs of its customers. Starting with an assessment of business and technology needs, the solution is then carefully architected within the allocated budget. FusionStorm certified experts then integrate the solution into existing environments and processes. Once installed, they will support the solution, offering both 24×7 help desk and fully managed services. FusionStorm’s people, process, and use of technology have proven to be a successful formula, winning the company numerous awards.

Partnership with EMC

By partnering with EMC, FusionStorm gains access to a broad range of best of breed products from which they can create technology solutions that positively impact its clients’ business. Currently, FusionStorm is able to select products from EMC that enable more robust storage, backup, disaster recovery (DR), and compliance environments. FusionStorm is the key to understanding the needs of the business and architecting a solution that meets or exceeds those needs. The services that they wrap around the technology ensure that customers receive world class solutions that support current and future requirements. They go beyond creating and deploying a solution, they are the single point of contact for on-going support, and leverage proven certified experts to deliver remote managed service.

Fusion Storm has been working with EMC for five years and has achieved the highest level of partnership in the EMC Velocity program: Signature Partner status. This status reflects FusionStorm’s ability to deliver EMC-based solutions with a team of highly qualified professionals. In fact, the FusionStorm team boasts more than 30 individual EMC certifications. In addition to achieving Signature status, FusionStorm also became a member of EMC’s Authorized Services Network (ASN). This enables FusionStorm to act as the single point of contact for its customers, and also to have tight alignment and communications with EMC to quickly resolve any issues.  As a part of EMC’s ASN, FusionStorm continuously ensures that all aspects of planning, delivery, and support for EMC solutions are current.

As a validation of FusionStorm’s ability to successfully deliver world class backup solutions based on EMC technology, FusionStorm was awarded the prestigious Backup, Recovery, and Archive Partner of the Year award at EMC’s 2008 North America Partner Summit. This award honors the company that has demonstrated tremendous success and leveraged its deep expertise and knowledge base to enable customers to solve  critical business problems with EMC-based backup and archiving solutions. The award serves to validate what FusionStorm’s customers already know, that the combination of EMC software and FusionStorm’s intellectual property deliver real business value.

Ensuring Proper Backup and Recovery

Every organization is experiencing continuous data growth, creating data protection, cost, and performance challenges.  Recent ESG research[1] indicated that while keeping storage costs and growth in check is important, the number one challenge organizations faced with regard to storage is the need to improve backup and recovery processes. The top five challenges reported are displayed in Figure 1.

Why has backup and recovery become such a daunting challenge? In order to respond more quickly to changing market demands, IT is tasked with providing higher levels of service to the business while minimizing capital and operational expenses. This means keeping pace with the growing amount of data that needs to be protected within shrinking backup and recovery windows, with fewer resources and with potentially outdated equipment and software. It is important that IT get the backup right as more companies and industries are subject to an increasing number of regulation and compliance issues that demand information availability. This creates an additional burden for IT in that the data must not only be protected, but also easily searchable and retrievable. True end-to-end solutions need to consider all of these requirements to be effective. .

Given all the other challenges and emergencies that require the attention of IT resources on a daily basis, there is little time left to evaluate new technology and adequately assess, design, implement, and manage a new backup and recovery solution.

Selecting the Right Partner

Organizations need enhanced solutions to meet current and future needs, but with existing staff stretched so thin, many must rely on proficient solution providers. Therefore, partner selection is important. Items to consider in the selection process are:

• Professional Services: Leveraging companies that provide a full suite of professional and managed services can really help to accelerate the time to value for a new backup and recovery solution. The partner should have strong vendor backing and a history of delivering valuable solutions. The fact that EMC recognized FusionStorm as its Backup, Recovery & Archive Partner of the Year is a very good indicator of the quality of their services.
• Certifications and Corporate Partnerships: Verify that the staff has the appropriate vendor certifications and strong vendor relationships. FusionStorm has more than 30 technical certifications just from EMC, is in the top tier of EMC’s velocity program, and is part of EMC’s Authorized Service Network. They have earned ASN specialty designation in both Consolidation and Backup, reflecting their deep commitment to knowledge and expertise of EMC solutions
• Use of Best Practices: Ensuring that a provider utilizes best practices and proven methodologies is also indicative of a reputable company. Standard operating procedure for FusionStorm includes a four step methodology to deliver repeatable, predictable results.
• Geographic Coverage Area: Can the company provide support for the solutions—either directly or via remote managed services? FusionStorm has offices and support staff nationwide.
• Post-sale support: Another significant selection criterion is the level of support provided after the sale. Does the company offer managed services or handle maintenance and break/fix for the solutions it designs and implements? Because FusionStorm offers managed services, it makes sense that the better it does designing and implementing a solution, the easier it will be to manage, resulting in higher service levels to the business.

The Bigger Truth

FusionStorm has steadily grown its business and expanded its offerings to solve its customers’ most challenging problems. They partner with industry leading software and technology vendors like EMC to ensure rock solid solutions and invest heavily in training staff so they can remain current on the latest solutions and architectures. As companies struggle to meet the service levels demanded by the business, companies like FusionStorm are well positioned to help accelerate the time to value for new IT investments or to help optimize existing ones.  If they are not on your short list, they should be.

Overview

As the global recession of 2009 morphs into the global recovery of 2010, CIOs will continue to face a financial climate highlighted by uncertainty and tremendous IT budgetary pressures.  In this economy, the ‘do more with less’ IT mantra will continue unabated, but CIOs are still responsible for IT departments that drive the business, create new revenue opportunities, and improve business processes.  These IT priorities were clearly reflected by ESG research data in early 2009: When asked to identify business initiatives with the greatest impact on IT, survey respondents said that cost reduction initiatives and business process improvement were their organization’s highest priorities (see Figure 1).[1] Given the remaining economic clouds, CIOs will likely have similar priorities moving forward.

The top two objectives presented here are interrelated, leading to competing challenges for CIOs.  Business process improvements often require new types of Web 2.0 applications for improved collaboration and communications.  These applications, in turn, demand high performance/low latency networking to support more sessions, connections, rich content, and security services.  How in the world can CIOs develop new applications and enhance application delivery services when they are under intense pressure to avoid big purchases and continue to cut costs?

What Can be Done?

At its root, IT has but one purpose: align business goals with technology tools to improve responsiveness, productivity, and automation.  This goal doesn’t change during tough economic times, but since CIOs are forced to squeeze resources, they must move beyond status-quo solutions and approach their jobs with creativity, flexibility, and open minds.  To achieve this goal, ESG sees progressive organizations:

• Simplifying network architectures. Most networks grew organically over time—a new subnet here, a new VLAN there, and servers everywhere.  It doesn’t take too long for this ad-hoc growth to create a rat’s nest of wires and lots of operational overhead.  Smart organizations are actively addressing this network mess by consolidating data centers, collapsing disparate data center segments into flat L2 networks, and adopting server virtualization.
• Implementing all-in-one enterprise technologies. As part of simplifying their networks, many organizations are looking to replace their portfolios of network appliances with high-performance, multi-function systems.  These “Network Services Super Gateways” (NSSGs) are the networking equivalent of super computers, designed to balance large parallel workloads across shared memory and processors while accommodating split second changes in requirements.  ESG sees strong demand for NSSGs in two areas:  network security and Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs).
• Evaluating alternative vendors. Through the years, many networking vendors have become complacent when it comes to innovation.  These vendors tend to offer high priced/high margin products that can’t help CIOs contain capital or operating costs.  ESG sees more and more large organizations opening the door to new network upstarts with modern products that take advantage of Moore’s Law to offer tremendous scale and performance in a consolidated, low-cost footprint.

NSSGs Offer New Performance and Economic Model

A few years ago, ESG was introduced to A10 Networks, a Silicon Valley-based startup with an impressive networking and IT industry pedigree.  The company was founded in 2004 by Lee Chen, former co-founder and VP of Engineering at Foundry Networks.  Since its inception, A10 has been focused on creating a radically new ADC architecture in order to deliver twice the performance at half the price of its competitors.  To accomplish this, A10 equipped its ADCs with:

• Custom hardware. In assessing the ADC market, A10 discovered that a lot of operations were performed in software.  This meant that available ADC performance was extremely limited unless customers were willing to ‘throw a lot of hardware’ at the problem by purchasing additional modules, processors, or memory.  Following an old Silicon Valley formula, A10 moved a lot of ADC processes from software to hardware in its high-end appliances.  This design gives A10 boxes extremely high performance in small cost-effective devices.
• A scalable operating system. Rather than simply customize the Linux operating system, A10 built its Advanced Core Operating System (ACOS) from the ground up to take advantage of modern multi-core processors.  This helps A10 achieve linear scalability across a unique shared memory system.

These advances alone made A10 Networks an attractive option for enterprise customers with lots of Internet-facing applications.  Recently, however, A10 Networks upped the ante by introducing:

• A 64-bit version of ACOS. A10 may be the first ADC vendor to extend its operating system and data path from 32- to 64-bit.  What’s the big deal?  While a wider data path allows for an increase of data processing, the most immediate benefit is the unlocking of memory resources; 32-bit systems are limited to 4 GB of memory per CPU core.  Since so many functions in the ADC are dependent on memory, A10’s 64-bit systems can scale all operations—the number of users, connections, services, RAM caching, etc.  The 64-bit OS creates a win for the IT department (more sessions per ADC appliance to drive consolidation) and a win for the customer (more RAM cache equals faster content and transaction delivery).

In summary, the wider data path allows for an exponential increase in data processing.  Think of a 2 lane highway. Increasing the speed limit on the highway could potentially increase the number of cars traveling on the road, but there are physical limits to the increases. Alternatively, you increase the number of lanes from 2 to 8. In this case, even if each car never went any faster, it would still be possible to quadruple the amount of traffic.

• A range of 64-bit hardware platforms. As we’ve learned in other tech markets such as enterprise software and the video game industry, to unlock the power of 64-bit systems, a 64-bit OS must work with the overall hardware design. Otherwise, the system will default to the lower common denominator of 32-bit processing. A10 addressed this limitation with a new line of 64-bit AX Series hardware platforms running the 64-bit version of ACOS.

With a 64-bit platform utilizing shared memory, the AX platforms have the capacity to consolidate advanced enterprise features. This is attractive for customers with cloud computing, virtualization, and security initiatives as all of the advanced features can be run on a single application platform and can help reduce operating costs. All of the new 64-bit models include carrier grade hardware components, redundant power supplies for reliability, and solid state drives (SSDs) for the environmentally conscious.

• Advent of the NSSG “Supercomputer Class” ADCs. Previously, the only ADCs that could address the capacity for the world’s top enterprises, Web sites, and service providers were chassis-based systems with racks of blades. At the top of its 64-bit lineup, A10’s new high-end models are the first to bring this capability into 2U appliances that deliver up to 3 million Layer 4 connections per second and 40 Gbps throughput with up to 16 10Gb ports, surpassing most chassis systems currently available.  Both models have enough juice to serve as a data center application platform to run solutions for initiatives such as data center consolidation, virtualization, cloud computing, IPv6, Large Scale Network Address Translation (NAT), security, and more in addition to core server load balancing and application acceleration functionality.  At under $200k with all features included, customers can decrease their cost per transaction while increasing user connections. Given this, A10’s NSSG “Supercomputer Class” ADCs should certainly be considered for demanding applications.
• An extended product line. In the past, ADCs were really limited to large enterprises.  Why?  Design limitations meant that ADCs were generally too expensive for smaller organizations.  Recently, however, A10 Networks broke through this enterprise-focused glass ceiling by extending its AX ADC product line down-market.  The ‘low-end’ AX 2500 comes in a 1U form factor, offers 10Gbps performance, and supports up to 300k L4 connections per second at a list price under $25k.  Each successive model number steps up the processor, memory, or both to boost advanced features such as RAM caching, layer 7 processing, and deep packet inspection performance.  ESG believes that this type of price/performance will be a perfect fit for small to extremely large enterprises seeking to start small and grow over time.
• An integrated DNS application firewall. While A10 downplayed this in its announcements, ESG believes that DNS firewall capabilities may be extremely attractive for enterprise customers with large, dynamic, and growing networks.  The DNS firewall performs three important functions:  1) It offloads DNS request traffic from the existing DNS infrastructure, 2) It acts as a DNS proxy blocking malicious DNS traffic and DDoS attacks, and 3) It throws A10’s signature high performance at DNS to accelerate the total network experience.

Ultimately, this technical mumbo-jumbo is easily summarized.  With its recent announcements, A10 Networks can pack more horsepower and ADC services into a family of extremely small, high-performing, and environmentally-friendly devices.  This should make the AX series even more attractive than it is today.

The Bigger Truth

While the economy remains in the doldrums, Internet innovation continues at a staggering pace.  Leading edge companies will continue to develop new Web-based applications, helping them increase revenue, improve productivity, and enhance collaboration.  In the near-term, however, large organizations will have to build this new software functionality while simultaneously reducing costs.

Difficult?  Yes.  Impossible?  No, but it will take creativity, IT simplification, consolidation, and creativity.  Progressive CIOs will extend this by eschewing the status quo and keeping an open mind toward new and innovative technology pioneers.  In ESG’s humble opinion, A10 Networks fits this description as it has attacked the existing ADC category with a new design, operating system, and economic model. Its recent 64-bit offering and the extension of its product line only add to the company’s unique value.  Given these qualities, CIOs would be wise to add A10 Networks to their short lists of ADC vendors.

Overview

Even during times of economic instability, IT departments are likely to increase spending on virtualization software (cited by 45% of respondents in a recent ESG IT spending survey[1]) as they look to reduce costs by consolidating server infrastructure, maximizing asset utilization, streamlining IT operations by automating routine IT tasks, and improving service levels to the business. Thirty-eight percent of respondents also indicated that their organization’s spending on storage hardware will increase as they look to accommodate data growth from applications and databases and scale their virtualization deployments.

Undercurrents of efficiency and cost reduction are evident throughout IT organizations, regardless of size or industry, and, as shown in Figure 1, server spending continues to be concentrated on virtualization and consolidation initiatives. ESG finds that businesses are still willing to invest in solutions that can quickly demonstrate a favorable ROI and lay the foundation for future opportunity and growth. Virtualization is acting as a catalyst for transformation as businesses balance new platform investments with cost containment and higher degrees of service.

Virtualization appears to be a consistent bright spot despite macroeconomic headwinds—and technology powerhouses Cisco, EMC, and VMware aren’t about to sit on their hands. Quite to the contrary, they are joining forces and making cooperative investments to deliver products, services, and support as a team.

On November 3, 2009 the three companies announced:

• A coalition (VCE) tasked to design, build, deploy, and support solutions for customers planning to adopt virtualization (and cloud) as a strategic transformative IT model. This coalition will promote collaboration between the entities and leverage a well-established, well-funded ecosystem of technology, service, and channel partners, system integrators, and business consultants.
• Vblock infrastructure packages as integrated, tested, and supported platforms for highly virtualized environments. Vblocks will come in small, medium, and large sizes to match varied virtualization objectives and will incorporate integrated compute, network, and storage resources into a modular, pod-like design. Vblocks will also include management, virtualization, and security solutions wrapped around the infrastructure designed to meet compliance and regulatory requirements. They will be delivered pre-integrated and available directly through Cisco and EMC, although expect them to be directed to numerous channel partners and system integrators already trained and competent on the complete solutions.
• Enablement services to help businesses develop the foundation for a next generation data center that is underpinned with virtualization across all infrastructure tiers. These services will focus on initiatives that migrate existing mission critical workloads running on a physical asset to new virtualized platforms and will help transition customers through all of the phases of consolidation, test, and deployment—ending with IT as a service: true cloud computing. The ultimate goal of the enablement services is to demonstrate the value of virtualization and cloud computing; share strategic direction; and architect, design, and deploy a highly dynamic IT operating environment that can instantly and transparently react to business change.
• A seamless support experience that enables customers to lean on a common support structure for rapid problem resolution.  Support facilities will house joint problem re-creation labs operated by cross company and cross platform professionals. A cooperative engineering effort will also be in place to ensure common alignment and an efficient problem escalation process.  Service and support specialists from each of the three companies will join to form a single, seamless support experience (think “1-800-CALL VCE”). Partners will also play a key role in designing, implementing, and support for their customers.
• A Cisco and EMC joint services venture named Acadia (formerly code named “Alpine”) to help accelerate the adoption of virtualization and the transparent transition from physical to virtual and ultimately to cloud computing. Acadia is a services firm that will perform assessments, design, build, operate, and transfer integrated functional end-to-end solutions from the coalition. Acadia does not plan to sell or support standalone Vblock infrastructure packages and will leave this up to the channel and partner ecosystem. The joint venture is initially targeted at large enterprises and service providers.  Major systems integrators have also invested in their own practices to design and deliver this type of service leveraging the Vblock infrastructure, so customers will have choices. Cisco and EMC are majority investors along with VMware and Intel.

Teamwork, integrated product offerings, a common support model, and a joint services venture: these are all targeted at helping businesses accurately size and implement the initial stable foundation for a highly dynamic IT environment and then modularly transform it into an internal service provider for the future. Cisco, EMC, and VMware share a common data center view, leveraging virtualization as the baseline upon which to build this vision. Vblocks will initially come in three sizes: Vblock 2 for high-end configurations, Vblock 1 as a mid-sized configuration, and Vblock 0 as an entry-level configuration. Cisco, EMC, and VMware have sized the Vblocks on a per virtual machine basis, but the workload will ultimately drive the consolidation ratio. Vblock 2 and Vblock 1 will be generally available immediately and Vblock 0 will be available in 2010.

Big Ships Maneuver into the Harbor

Cisco, EMC, and VMware are all established businesses with independent sales, marketing, engineering, and partner ecosystems. Forming a coalition and “maneuvering all these ships into the harbor” is not a simple undertaking. This is not the first example of collaboration and investment amongst these companies. Cisco and Intel are minority shareholders in VMware, which is majority-owned by EMC; the companies have proven technology integration with solutions like the Nexus 1000V and have a shared business interest in making their customers successful.

The stars are aligning for Cisco, EMC, and VMware as they match products, solutions, and services to the top server virtualization initiatives. As shown in Figure 2, consolidation, expanded application adoption, disaster recovery, business continuity, and improved operational processes are all top of mind for business that recognize the value of virtualization and want to expand on their success. The good news for customers—as well as for Cisco, EMC, and VMware—is that each of these vendors has existing solutions that map nicely to top server initiatives.  With the alignment, customers should have simplified access and accelerated time to deployment of large-scale solutions that help achieve their virtualization goals.

This announcement is well timed as companies recognize that virtualization is more than a technology that improves resource utilization and helps to achieve new levels of consolidation—or transformation. Businesses now view virtualization as a strategy to consolidate data centers, reduce utility expenditures, improve the quality of life for IT operations, and deliver IT resources to the application and line of business owners where and when they need it most.

As these giant ships pull in to dock, they should find themselves welcomed because:

• The coalition aligns with IT goals and business strategy. It is relatively simple for IT to migrate and consolidate applications and workloads onto a virtualized platform, but changes soon face resistance from “server huggers.” Cisco, EMC, and VMware will help educate; train; and provide best practices, frameworks, and blueprints to help build confidence in the virtualization platform and ultimately make it the platform of choice for all x86-based workloads. Many mature virtualization deployments have adopted a “virtualize first” policy with a penalty to deploy on a physical asset. Cisco, EMC, and VMware will help guide and deliver products to help all customers achieve these goals.
• Service and support are key to accelerating adoption and achieving maximum density. Customers with ambitious virtualization goals recognize that they need help and expertise. The virtualization and cloud markets are by no means flooded with such expertise. The x86 platform has been operating inefficiently for years and enterprises are ready to make a change to reflect the stability, availability, and performance their other platforms provide. Server virtualization has been equated to “a software mainframe” by VMware’s CEO Paul Maritz as the platform of choice for existing workloads as well as a development platform for new applications. Now Cisco, EMC, and VMware will help design, implement, and support the next generation data center.  More mature data center operations have bought into the promise of virtualization—and now need help to make it a reality across their enterprises.  Such major endeavors require major vendor support —and these three are at the very core of these initiatives—putting them in the perfect spot to drive the market at this entry point.
• IT shares a common sentiment of “I never got fired for choosing Cisco, EMC, or VMware.” The enterprises and service providers, which this coalition is targeting, most likely already have established relationships with one or all three of these leading IT vendors. With Vblock, a common service delivery model, and seamless support experience, it should become easier for the customer to consume, implement, and support a highly virtualized IT environment.

Cisco, EMC, and VMware are combining intelligence to build and deliver the next generation data center that fundamentally leverages virtualization at all tiers. The Cisco UCS (Unified Computing System) consolidates the server and networking infrastructures into common building blocks that tightly integrate with solutions from EMC and VMware.  The Vblocks include element managers for each sub-solution and EMC adds further value by offering an add-on Ionix for data center management package along with RSA solutions for security and compliance.  With or without the additional management software, the Vblock components are fully supported into most high-level management frameworks already, such as HP Openview.

How the Ships Fill Their Sails

Keeping a single ship afloat requires a crew that works as a team and can efficiently execute maneuvers. Maintaining a fleet of ships introduces complexity that requires cooperation, trust, and open communication. Cisco, EMC, and VMware all have strong captains in John Chambers, Joe Tucci, and Paul Maritz, respectively. Frankly, the companies all recognize an opportunity in the market they are not about to let pass them by.  The customers with the highest demand for this type of offering just happen to be the biggest on the planet—and are already large Cisco and EMC clients. They share a common vision and belief in virtualization and cloud computing, see firsthand what their top accounts are planning, and recognize this timing as an opportunity to strike as a team. To maximize customer value and drive new sales, this team must:

• Avoid a terminology debate around the “cloud.” Cloud computing is nothing more than a self-service consumption model where business workloads are deployed and transparently executed, either internally or somewhere on the Internet, and delivered to businesses that only pay for what they consume. Private cloud, internal cloud, and public cloud make for great marketing lingo, but these companies will spin their wheels and waste valuable time if “cloud” is what they try to sell. Businesses are focused on cost containment, consolidation, improved IT automation, instant access to IT resources, security, compliance, and delivering IT as a consistent predictable service.
• Share a common management deployment and execution strategy. Cisco has its Cisco UCS Manager, which is embedded device-management software that manages the Cisco Unified Computing System as a single logical, highly available entity from end to end. EMC has Ionix, which simplifies and automates tasks such as discovery, monitoring, reporting, planning, and provisioning for large, complex physical and virtual infrastructures. VMware’s vCenter Server provides a scalable and extensible platform that forms the foundation for virtualization management. How are they going to collectively work as a single data center management tool and how will they integrate with existing enterprise management investments? EMC announced Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager as the glue for UCS Manager, Symetrix Management Console, and vCenter as a single point management console for Vblocks. This will help.
• Agree on deal ownership. EMC and Cisco share common customers and, in some cases, they may even have a relationship with the same customer executives. With this coalition, both Cisco and EMC will sell products, services, and support, but they also need to play nice inside their largest enterprise and service provider accounts. This is easier to do as a customer facing entity, but harder to pull off internally with two sales organizations.
• Have vertical expertise. ESG recently worked with a health care organization that recognized the value of Cisco, EMC, and VMware independent of this announcement. However, HIPAA privacy rules and EMR (electronic medical record) initiatives drove this company to the technology and services. The same holds true for the sudden wave of service providers focused on IaaS (infrastructure as a service). Cisco, EMC, and VMware have to clarify the value of their solution and how it ultimately equates to service provider revenue. The focus on security, compliance, auditing, and the trust factor will significantly help in this area.

The competition in the market is not about to sit still either. The other platform OEMs—Dell, HP, and IBM—are all amped up with virtualization and cloud initiatives. Examples include solutions comprised of Dell, Scalent, Equallogic – HP Matrix and ProCurve – IGS (IBM global services) with CloudBurst in addition to the public cloud offerings from the likes of Amazon and Google.  Enemies are friends, and friends become enemies.  No one is going to want to miss this opportunity and, as such, everyone will be gunning for the coalition.

In reality, 95% of the market will continue to buy virtualization offerings from the likes of the major “piece part” suppliers— Dell, HP, IBM, etc.—and that is perfectly fine.  There is a more aggressive, higher-end customer base that will desire, then require, the likes of the VCE coalition to move them to the next level.  Over time, IBM, HP, Dell, and others will develop their own initiatives and capabilities aimed at this slice of the market, but the fact is they will be just fine continuing to serve the more mainstream markets.

The Bigger Truth

We are on the threshold of an era in which environments achieve 100% virtualization, but we still have a long way to go. From a technology perspective, Cisco, EMC, and VMware are on to something that is very important and not yet fully recognized by the masses. Without infrastructure virtualization, we will always be less than the sum of our parts. Infrastructure requirements include solutions with infinite dynamic scale that are self-healing, self-tuning, self-managing, and initiate daily cost reduction. With infrastructure virtualization, the “plumbing” does matter and an integrated solution, such as the Vblock from Cisco, EMC, and VMware, holds value for having some of the best of breed technologies that are available in the market today, now delivered as an integrated solution with common support and services.

The data center of the future is quickly shaping into a self-service, automated environment driven by business policy. At the heart of the data center is an immense compute fabric with the ability to expand out into the Internet based on demand, cost, and security.  When transformations of this magnitude occur, customers naturally look to trusted suppliers.  A coalition such as this comes along rarely, where three dominant market players find such immense new opportunities and success looms if they are able to put their individual ego and identity aside.  If they can play nice, they clearly have a huge leg up in terms of market credibility and incumbency status.  If they can’t get out of their own collective way and don’t work out potential infighting and control battles, the whole thing could be a non-starter.  Customers want solutions and they want alliances like this—it’s better for them if all their vendors are on the same page and not battling inside the customer data center.  Frankly, without it, we leave it up to the customer to master their own technologies and services before wide-spread deployments become commonplace, which isn’t good for anyone.

It remains to be seen whether this coalition will reach its full potential, but it is clear that it does have the potential to cause huge reverberations across the entire market.  Cisco, EMC, and VMware will continue to foster their own ecosystems as they increase resources and invest with one another. Everyone will be affected by this one way or another: competitors, users, and observers.  These are LARGE forces at work that could alter the landscape the same way a seismic shift in the continental divide can—wreaking havoc as it moves.

Overview

Over the past 10 years, enterprise information security practices have gone through a transformation.  Driven by new regulations such as GLBA, HIPAA, California Senate Bill 1386, and the EU Privacy Directive, large organizations have added specific data security controls and technologies to their existing stable of firewalls, IDS/IPS, and desktop security software.    All of a sudden, CIOs were demanding that sensitive data be encrypted, but this alone wasn’t enough.  Seeing a new opportunity, investors, innovators, and existing security vendors created new data security products in two categories:  Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and Enterprise Rights Management (eRM).

DLP and eRM technologies share similar functionality, but take a somewhat opposite approach to data security (see Figure 1). Since large organizations often store terabytes of data, DLP technology assumes that they can’t possibly know about or secure all of it. Therefore, DLP scans data and if it determines that the data is, in fact, sensitive, then enforces a high-level security policy. For example, if DLP discovers an unencrypted e-mail message containing credit card numbers or patient data, it can block the e-mail, inform the employee (i.e., the sender) of a policy violation, and notify security.

Alternatively, Enterprise Rights Management occupies a different data security role. eRM assumes that specific data is extremely sensitive, but must be shared with lots of users in the course of business processes. Think of examples like intellectual property which may be shared by internal and external groups. With eRM, data security can be extremely granular depending upon security policies, users, and the business processes. A lawyer may be able to read a contract, but can’t modify or print the document. A software engineer may be given access to source code for a few hours only.

For some reason, the financial market and industry decided that DLP and eRM were rival technologies competing for the same funding and customer wins. This then prompted DLP and eRM vendors to proceed down separate development paths and embed their own command-and-control, policy management, and reporting engines into each product: great if these products remain separate, though it ultimately complicates data security management for enterprise organizations.

Eventually, the market seemed to make a choice between the two categories.  Of these two, DLP was deemed a better fit for regulatory compliance and, since compliance was driving security budgets, DLP was proclaimed the winner.  Venture capitalists backed a slew of DLP vendors (Reconnex, Tablus, Vontu, etc.), many were acquired by larger vendors (McAfee, RSA Security, Symantec), and the DLP industry consolidated accordingly.  Alternatively, eRM was relegated to the “niche” vendor category.  Early eRM vendors went belly up or were bought on the cheap by content management vendors (EMC Documentum) and Oracle.  Now that eRM requirements are increasing, today’s market is really made up of three vendors:  Adobe (Adobe application and file format support only), Microsoft (Microsoft application and file format support only), and Liquid Machines (Independent, cross-platform vendor).

Enterprise Requirements Demand Both DLP and eRM

Fast forward to the end of 2009 and you’ll quickly see a different landscape.  Data security requirements have become far broader and more complex than they were a few short years ago.  CISOs now need to protect confidential data stored on a potpourri of devices, from thumb drives to enterprise arrays, accessed by an army of internal and external users.  Given this scale and complexity, large organizations are demanding enterprise data security solutions rather than point products, tactical business solutions, or limited IT security offerings (see Figure 2).

From a practical standpoint, new enterprise requirements signify an official end to the historical turf wars between DLP and eRM.  Large organizations need the full and integrated capabilities of both products because:

• Data security goes beyond compliance alone. DLP gained its popularity for one primary reason: to prevent data breaches associated with regulatory compliance.  In this regard, DLP was a quick fix—when ePHI data was included in an e-mail attachment, gateway DLP appliances could block this regulated data at the network perimeter.  Yes, this is still a requirement, but ESG’s research indicates that large organizations are also concerned with other matters such as overall security, new types of security threats, IP protection, and corporate governance (see Figure 3).  When measured by these requirements, the combination of DLP and eRM is a far more comprehensive solution than DLP alone.

• Data security must extend to external users. According to ESG research, about 60% of enterprise organizations (i.e. organizations with 1,000 employees or more) share confidential data with external business constituencies like partners, suppliers, or customers as part of their day-to-day business processes.[1] Globalization and business process outsourcing will likely exacerbate this trend moving forward.  Sharing confidential data with outsiders demands fine-grained entitlements management so business managers can implement flexibility policies to determine who can see confidential data and what they can do with it.  Enterprise Rights Management is perfectly suited for this job as it can enforce security policies on a user, document, or application basis.
• Internal users are still a major security threat. More than one-third of security professionals (35%) believe that their organization is vulnerable to a confidential data breach emanating from “an employee (non-IT) with illegal access to confidential data.”  This was deemed the second biggest threat vector after “a lost or stolen IT asset” (47% of respondents).  To address internal threats, CISOs need a complete picture of confidential data; tight controls for users, documents, and applications; and visibility into data movement and user behavior.  DLP and eRM complement each other to provide this end-to-end internal coverage.

• Data discovery and classification remain extremely difficult. The DLP crowd was right about one thing: data discovery and classification can be extremely difficult in a distributed enterprise with multiple terabytes of all kinds of data. It turns out that many organizations aren’t very good at this. According to ESG research, 33% of security professionals say that their organization is either “fair” or “poor” at “classifying and tracking the movement and copying of confidential data” (see Figure 4).[2] The merger of DLP and eRM offers immediate benefits here—DLP could be used for data discovery and classification and then eRM enforces security policy based upon these classifications.

These individual requirements are certainly better addressed by a combination of DLP and eRM, but large organizations also want product integration for other reasons.  An integrated data security suite can help enterprise firms establish a better end-to-end understanding of their security status; centralize command-and-control, policy management, and reporting; and lower the cost of security operations (see Figure 5).  These goals are especially pertinent in a recessionary period where CIOs are trying to improve security while rationalizing costs.

The Bigger Truth

The security industry is slowly waking up to an emerging market reality: large organizations don’t want security point products; they want enterprise security technologies that align with corporate policies and business processes.  Certainly, some companies will still purchase DLP and eRM on a tactical basis, but an increasing number will demand integrated functionality, management, and reporting for all their data security needs.

What does this mean?  Large organizations will want to work with vendors that can provide enterprise-class products and services.  In other words, vendors that want to play in this space will need to develop, acquire, or partner to create an integrated data security suite that includes both DLP and eRM functionality.  Clearly, some vendors understand this trend: Microsoft teamed up with RSA to integrate its Active Directory Rights Management Server (RMS) with RSA’s DLP suite, McAfee partners with Adobe and Liquid Machines, and Symantec and Websense team with Liquid Machines alone.  As more big security vendors recognize the rising value of eRM, it is increasingly likely that Liquid Machines gets scooped up, leaving the others to develop their own eRM functionality, acquire a nascent niche vendor, partner with a content management supplier, or focus on Microsoft and/or Adobe.

So what happens next?  Ultimately, large companies and government agencies want a data security suite (including DLP, eRM, and encryption) that provides enterprise coverage for compliance, IP protection, and transparent governance.  Thus, the vendors with the best end-to-end data security suites will compete for large deals, enterprise software licenses, and multi-year contracts.  Those that cannot put these suites together through product development, partnering, or acquisition will be moved out of the mainstream toward the point products fringes.  These vendors should focus on the SMB market as they will become irrelevant in the enterprise very soon.

[2] Ibid.

Overview

Started in 2001, the QLogic Signature Partner program has evolved into a first class global program that has garnered the five star rating award from Everything Channel for the last four years in a row. Its success is due to its focus on helping to make the reseller as successful and profitable as possible. So why make a change now? QLogic is investing in a new, simpler program to enable its channel partners take advantage of its growing portfolio of products. Previously, QLogic maintained separate programs for different products with different goals and objectives. There was one for Fibre Channel (FC) and iSCSI/NAS products, another for InfiniBand (IB)/HPC, and yet another for the government sector. Moving forward, a single umbrella program (regardless of market) will incorporate the FC, iSCSI, and IB technologies as “tracks” and will also expand to include emerging technologies like Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and cover additions to QLogic’s portfolio, like Ethernet (via NetXen acquisition).

The ultimate goal of the new Signature Partner Program is to emphasize QLogic’s commitment to the channel. By providing additional benefits that open up new technology markets for its resellers worldwide and makes them more profitable, QLogic is demonstrating that commitment in a tangible way.

Analysis

Despite having a recipe for success with its previous program, QLogic recognized the opportunity to be more flexible and make it easier for its channel partners to grow their businesses, especially as new technologies are rolled out. The new program has some significant differences that channel partners should take advantage of if they want to improve their bottom lines.

The biggest change is converting the previous multi-tiered, technology-specific model into a simplified single umbrella model with multiple technology-based tracks (i.e., FC, FCoE, etc.). Let’s take a look at how this new program will impact the resellers:

• Simplification – Previously, partners received additional benefits based upon their tier, which is in turn based on revenue and certification levels. These benefits were restricted to the individual program they were in (FC/iSCSI/NAS, IB/HPC, Govt., etc.) and typically only applied to larger resellers with higher revenues. The new program is a single, combined entity with different technology tracks and benefits that can be obtained through not only revenue and certification levels, but also through metrics such as brand loyalty (level of exclusivity) and cross-platform portfolio sales. Essentially, by combining and simplifying the programs, resellers of any size, type, or level can now earn additional benefits from QLogic.
• Elimination of certification fees – Now that QLogic is making it easier to sell a larger portfolio of products (including FCoE and Ethernet), it has also taken steps to make it easier for channel partners to get trained and certified. It should be noted that QLogic is not using this as an opportunity to have partners to spend more time and money on classes. In fact, for a limited time, QLogic is waiving technical certification fees—a value of $2,400—and allowing its partners to test out of training classes. This is a brilliant strategy—as more VARs get trained, QLogic will get mentioned in more conversations with end-users. In addition, QLogic has invested in a new virtual technical training class, eliminating the need for channel partners to incur travel expenses in addition to losing valuable time (3 days) out of the field, enabling technical resources to take the class and test at their convenience from any location. The new program will continue to offer the online sales training course at no charge.
• Further commitment to the channel model – Partners enrolled in the new program will enjoy increased registration discounts on products. In addition, QLogic will offer a best price guarantee for the first partner to register a deal—those in the FC program will be familiar with this and now it will be rolled out to the entire program. In order to encourage expansion and make it easier to have a profitable business, QLogic will increase growth rebate payouts while lowering growth targets. Probably one of the biggest changes is the inclusion of all OEM-branded products going towards program credit, including IBM and HP. This is a real differentiator for channel programs as it allows resellers to get double the credit for any QLogic products sold through an OEM.

The new program should suit channel partners as ESG research[1] indicates that they want their technology vendors to constantly improve or refresh product lines, create partner programs, and provide adequate support and training (see Figure 1). This is especially true for those partners selling to enterprise customers.

The new program should also provide value to the end-user community. With reduced fees, more partners can take advantage of training and certification; the net result being that there are more knowledgeable resellers better equipped to solve customer problems. The partners that make the effort to achieve certifications will be rewarded with Signature status and will be differentiated from other resellers.

The Bigger Truth

Channel partners are constantly looking for companies with best of breed products and a strong commitment to an indirect selling model. QLogic is trying to fulfill both of those requirements by consistently delivering a strong product line and making investments to expand that line, as its additions of iSCSI, IB, FCoE, and now Ethernet demonstrate. With these expansions, QLogic resellers now have a complete portfolio of connectivity options. The new program also makes it easier for partners to get trained and certified on QLogic solutions. The addition of all OEM-branded products for credit, plus brand loyalty and cross platform rewards, means it is easier than ever to have a profitable business reselling QLogic solutions

Resellers that make an investment and take advantage of the free training and certification for the entire product line can expand their businesses with minimal risk while differentiating themselves from other resellers. One potential area for concern will be managing potential channel conflict for the technology segments. If most QLogic resellers take advantage of this opportunity, resellers in certain geographies may be facing competition from formerly complimentary resellers—perhaps an HPC partner that is now selling FCoE and FC or the reverse. QLogic will need to monitor these situations closely to avoid any discontent.

The new Signature Partner Program offers resellers an opportunity to deliver an expanded range of products to customers while driving increased profits to the bottom line. Now, QLogic needs to make sure the channel understands the new program and how to take advantage of it. For most companies, it is easier not to change something that isn’t broken, so QLogic deserves some kudos for overhauling its award winning program to deliver one that provides even greater benefits to its resellers

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International Computerware, Accelerating Growth

Though the solutions, technologies and business strategies have changed over the years, ICI’s goal of 100% client satisfaction has not. ICI is focused exclusively on delivering data management solutions and storage systems and services. If you are looking for VOIP technology or servers, ICI is not the provider to partner with. If, however, you want to work with a laser focused solution provider that dedicates its resources to data management, ICI should be on your short list. Seven years ago, ICI only provided its clients with professional services offerings surrounding storage, but customers wanted more. In addition to technology, customers wanted services that focused on assessing, architecting, procuring and deploying solutions. This led to the current ICI business model, focusing in several areas:

1. SAN, NAS, iSCSI & CAS Design and Deployment

Infrastructure, Backup and Virtualization Assessments

1. Backup, Recovery & Archiving Design and Deployment
2. Virtualization Architecture and Implementation
3. Disaster Recovery Design and Implementation
4. Information Security Solutions
5. IT Managed Services
6. Exchange Migration and Active Directory Services
7. Each area was carefully selected to enable ICI’s clients to build a storage infrastructure that satisfies today’s requirements with flexibility for tomorrow.

Even storage giant EMC leverages ICI’s expertise internally for certain services. Like all users of technology, EMC realized that in certain specialized environments, it is best to bring in services experts.

ICI’s Focus

ICI’s focus and investment on behalf of its customers has led to positive results. In 2007, the company was awarded EMC’s Mid-Market Partner of the Year for North America. In addition to vast education and certification efforts surrounding EMC solutions, ICI also has cross certification and training in surrounding technologies to aid clients in multi-vendor environments. According to customers, it is this multi-vendor support that differentiates solution providers from their competition. Customers want solution providers who know what software and hardware technologies are complimentary and why.

Virtualization Trends and Requirements

Virtualization services are a focus area for many ICI customers. A recent ESG research study found that 78% of respondents said that reducing IT capital costs led their organization to deploy server virtualization (see Figure 1). It is ICI’s goal to help customers get their arms around the financial benefits of virtualization technology and aid them in the decision making process. From a storage perspective, certain key areas of focus surrounding the virtualization process need to be examined; the first being the storage technology itself, as more than 30% of the respondents to ESG’s research stated they were going to deploy new iSCSI SAN or NAS technology with their virtualized environment. ICI needs to educate its customers and help them make the right technology decisions based upon factors such as replication requirements and new data protection methodologies leveraging virtualization technology.

FIGURE 1. CURRENT USERS: VIRTUAL SERVER DECISION DRIVERS

Source: ESG Research Report: The Impact of Server Virtualization on Storage, 2007

End-users should challenge solution providers during the review process and ensure that all options are clearly spelled out.

Leveraging the relationship between EMC and ICI will allow end-users to obtain the highest levels of support and knowledge transfer. ICI sees a number of infrastructures regularly, which is of great benefit to IT as the vision of most organizations is limited only to their own four walls. Mid-sized shops are typically resource constrained, but even well resourced environments can benefit from ICI’s experience in a variety of infrastructures.

The Bottom Line

ICI’s value is increasing in conjunction with the company’s growth. Technology assessments and implementations are becoming more complex, which is where solution providers have a chance to shine. ICI is doing just that.

Higher Growth Rates, Bigger Challenges

For most organizations, data storage growth rates are at 75% or more annually. This growth is compounded by larger data management challenges in areas like backup, archiving, security, data life cycle management and more. Enterprise class customers do experience these challenges, but typically have larger IT budgets and resources to address them. Companies in the mid-market face the same explosive growth rates, but rarely have the money and resources to handle the subsequent problems. They need solutions that reduce costs, increase productivity and minimize risk to the business.

Regardless of company size, IT must maintain current copies of production data and be able to search and locate archive data upon request. For example, in an ESG survey, more than one-third of mid-market respondents said they had been tasked with an electronic data discovery request. In the same survey, 54% of respondents said they could not always produce requested documents. Legal and compliance regulations do not favor the big or the small—they apply to all equally. Companies in electronic discovery situations need to produce documents faster than ever before in adherence with regulatory guidelines, such as those stated in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP). Mitigating risk and maintaining the ability to search and retrieve information when required are key concerns for all businesses.

Arrow Enterprise Computing Solutions (ECS) Group, a division of Arrow Electronics, Inc., took a leadership position by teaming with CommVault, a best of breed data management software company, and Hewlett Packard to offer better solutions to the channel. They are pre-tested, out of the box products to simplify IT’s data management software and storage requirements, and are deployed through trusted regional value-added resellers, who are capable of carrying on high-touch relationships with mid-market customers.

Business Ingenuity

It is not just about technology, it is also about delivering an easy to use solution—especially in the mid-market. In today’s mid-market space, customers need to do more with less, faster. They look to their vendors and solution providers for assistance. Some companies offer point products that only address a single instance issue, while others integrate technology in their labs so the customer experience is smoother.

There is obvious and legitimate value added by having disparate vendors integrate their solutions to offer their customers a pre-tested, pre-packaged solution that is built for easy deployment and backed by world class support. Customers get an integrated, proven solution that they know will work, which eliminates the problems associated with integrating products on site. This equates to faster production deployment, which will translate to enhanced business efficiency. ISV (Integrated Systems Vendor) programs are not new, but Arrow has taken a unique position as a master distributor in bringing the products and vendors together—and taking the solution to market. Arrow manages the CommVault/HP program and tests, integrates and packages the offerings for customers. My only problem with the program is: If it’s so obviously beneficial, how come every distributor isn’t doing it this way?

Mid-market customers are concerned with ease of use and plug-and-play rates out of the box to satisfy a business, market or technology challenge. In the past, the value-add of traditional large distributors has been limited to holding inventory and providing financing. By putting the pieces together, testing the solution and offering the package, Arrow can provide VARs—and ultimately, consumers—with much greater potential value. Arrow has pre-tested, packaged and built a support infrastructure to integrate the CommVault Data Management software and Hewlett Packard storage hardware solutions, targeting five specific applications:

1. Tiered Archiving: Many mid-market customers already move less frequently accessed data to lower tiers of archive storage. As shown in Table One, the most common reasons for doing so are economic, security and compliance-drivers. ESG recommends that all customers follow suit as they will see the immediate financial value. The integration of CommVault Data Management Software and HP hardware offered by Arrow addresses the challenges of setting policies for when, where and how the data should be moved for these customers out of the box.
   
   TABLE 1. REASONS FOR ADOPTING DIGITAL ARCHIVING SOLUTIONS, BY ORGANIZATION SIZE
   
   
   
   Source: ESG Research Report – Digital Archiving: End-User Survey & Market Forecast 2006-2010, January 2006.
   
2. Archiving Compliance Kit for Exchange Environment: Federal compliance and regulatory guidelines dictate when information must be made available as part of Electronic Data Discovery (EDD), along with management guidelines. For example, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure dictate that information be made available within two weeks of a certain date stamp. While large enterprises are more frequently subjected to electronic discovery requests, small and medium businesses still have a good chance of experiencing a legal hold. Arrow’s offering of a pre-tested solution that addresses these issues is of real value to the mid-market community. CommVault’s software offers IT compliance options, while simultaneously providing search and locate functionality required in today’s market. Pre-Enron, IT was just about off-limits in terms of legal discovery; however, IT is currently the focal point of discovery and companies need to be prepared.
3. “Go-Green” Data Protection for VMware Environments: Virtualized environments provide IT cost savings as the number of physical hardware and software components are reduced. In a recent survey conducted by the United States Department of Energy, the average cost of power has gone up 32% since 2000. In addition, increased storage capacity and processor power requirements continue to increase the demand for power by IT. It is not always just the cost—in some geographic locations today, it can become about power availability. A virtualized environment addresses some of the issues, but IT needs to be aware of backup and archiving challenges in a virtualized world. Arrow’s solution addresses existing CommVault Galaxy users in a VMware ESX server environment in addition to CommVault galaxy users considering virtualization, while improving power efficiency and other “Green” focus areas. Less infrastructure means less power consumption, footprint, cooling and all the other environmental cost hogs.
4. Business Continuity for Windows and Linux: Every day, companies have to close their doors as a result of lost data, which can be directly tied to a business continuity plan, or lack thereof. In Figure 1, which comes from a recent ESG survey, 33% of the respondents said they could go no more than four hours without critical application data before experiencing significant revenue loss. CommVault, HP and Arrow ECS understand these challenges and deliver a solution to mitigate the business risk.
   
   FIGURE 1. RTO LEVELS, BY ORGANIZATION SIZE
   
   
   
   Source: Enterprise Strategy Group
   
5. Business Continuity for Heterogeneous UNIX, Windows, Linux and NetWare Environments: This unified CommVault Data Management Software and HP hardware solution provides business continuity solutions for heterogeneous sites. Many products address point problems such as recovery time objectives (RTOs), recovery point objectives (RPOs) and security. HP/CommVault and Arrow understand the RPO, RTO and security needs of mid-market customers and have pre-tested this heterogeneous offering to address the goals of these users.

Arrow brings CommVault and HP Integrated Solutions Together

Point products fix point problems, but when it comes to data management, there is rarely a point problem. Users must be able to simultaneously search for and locate data while mitigating risk to ensure that information is always available to be used as a competitive advantage. In an ESG survey, 83% of the respondents said they have either deployed, or will deploy an archiving solution to counter the increase in data demand, in conjunction with compliance and regulatory requirements. Arrow has brought CommVault and HP together to integrate, test and support CommVault software on Hewlett Packard hardware to help mid-market customers with their challenges. These companies have simplified the integration, ordering, deployment and support processes for the solution at a time when budgets and resources continue to be tight.

TABLE 2. ELECTRONIC DATA DISCOVERY TRENDS, BY ORGANIZATION SIZE

The Bottom Line

ESG is a staunch proponent of these easy to understand technology bundles as they provide benefits to every type of organization—and none more so than for the mid-market customer. By engaging two best of breed suppliers—CommVault for data management software and Hewlett Packard for storage hardware—IT’s job in the mid-market can be dramatically simplified. It is not about the big eating the small; it is the fast eating the slow. By pre-testing, packaging and deploying key offerings, Arrow is providing IT the ability to maximize efficiency and quickly mitigate risk when it comes to data management, while at the same time taking some of the cost and complexity out of the testing and integration necessary to ensure the products work together as advertised. While VARs have historically provided some of this, many simply don’t have the expertise, time or resources to put these types of packages together. And, for the VARs that do, Arrow has provided significantly shorter time-to-market by alleviating the test burden so that these VARs can focus their energies and expertise on custom services, support and solution extensions that build on these starter kits for their customers. After all, that’s where the real value-add becomes tangible to IT organizations.

The Problem and the Market

Backup is one of the most important and difficult tasks for IT departments to manage and quantify. If you ask most end-users to quantify their total backup costs, you’ll likely get an uncertain answer. If you ask these same users how good their actual backup processes are, you can also expect an evasive answer much of the time. This is because most IT shops know that their backup processes are inefficient, but are either too overwhelmed or tentative to change backup strategies.

ESG views backup as a form of insurance. Most consumers of general insurance do not know the details of their policy until they experience an “event.” Backup is similar from that perspective. Many IT departments know they spend a lot on backup, but are not sure how to quantify their investment. In addition, they don’t know how inefficient their process is until they experience an ”event.”

ESG sees a need in the market for backup as a managed service, to monitor and manage the backup environment and ensure efficiencies, reduce costs and minimize the risk of data loss in case of an unexpected, disruptive event. To be truly effective, the managed services must also address information security concerns along with regulatory compliance requirements. Information security is a huge concern for companies, with data breaches resulting in immeasurable damage to corporate reputations. Users will be leery of sending their data off-site if they are not convinced that it is invulnerable.

During the discovery process of selecting a potential managed service provider (MSP), IT should be aware that the cost of labor will appear on the surface to increase when moving from a small internal team to an outsourced service provider. This can be misleading because the total cost associated with backup (license fees, maintenance fees, consumables, etc.) will likely decrease as the environment is managed more efficiently.

GlassHouse understands the complex world of backup efficiency, and fills the void in the market by enhancing its existing services offerings to include backup as a managed service. Unlike many IT functions, backup management has clear lines of demarcation which makes the function an ideal candidate for outsourcing to a specialist provider

GlassHouse’s Managed Service Offering

GlassHouse Technologies is one of the leading providers of independent infrastructure services, which include data protection, recovery and storage management, as well as storage business practice assessment, design and implementation. Over the years, GlassHouse has been providing its service expertise to many of the largest companies in the world. GlassHouse now has the ability to address the backup market with a series of outsourced offerings that provide users the ability to select their level of involvement in the backup process using GlassHouse tools, methodologies and resources.

The most comprehensive of the options available to customers is the outsourcing of their backup process to GlassHouse as a fully managed service. The GlassHouse family of offerings includes reporting services, support services and managed services, which allow for convenient ITIL mapping. ITIL is a major global initiative within the IT community designed to aid IT departments in creating and documenting best practices. In ITIL terms, reporting services monitor all instances of change management and record them in a change management database (CMDB). Support services, on the other hand, deal with incident or problem management. The benefit of the GlassHouse managed service offering is that it allows customers to reduce their reliance on support services, which are typically comprised of break-fix fire drills, by leveraging the experience and knowledge that GlassHouse continues to accumulate by engaging on a regular basis in many expansive IT environments.

End-users are not typically subject matter experts across multiple environments with regards to technological disciplines like backup. Utilizing ITIL, GlassHouse can establish best practices based on a collection of customers’ experiences, thereby ensuring that backup policies provide optimal results regardless of environments. It also helps to guarantee that users manage their backup environments proactively rather than reactively.

The GlassHouse backup MSP offering provides customers value in the area of process, skills and tools. The experience of providing backup services to users worldwide allows GlassHouse to compile and leverage best practices for every engagement in which they participate. The missing piece in terms of backup had always been the reliance on vendor-specific tools that did not provide enough detailed visibility across multiple environments and infrastructure elements. GlassHouse offers specialized backup reporting and diagnostic abilities, along with an accomplished services team, that sets them apart from their competitors.

These resources allow GlassHouse to structure Service Level Agreements (SLAs) surrounding the offering to provide clients clear visibility into performance, from the backup window attainment through backup success ratios all the way to restore success percentages, which is what it is really all about.

Users Engage Managed Services at Their Pace

The GlassHouse offering is built to drive operational excellence. From reporting and performance analysis tools, to off-hours support, clients can determine the level of engagement with a specialist firm like GlassHouse. Some clients will be ready to have GlassHouse provide a total managed service from the start in order to maximize business efficiency, while others prefer to make gradual changes to their processes.

For those customers that wish to retain control over their own backup environments, GlassHouse offers a solution that allows clients to manage, monitor and report on backup environments in-house. With this service, end-users maintain control of their backup, while leveraging proprietary technology that exposes areas of inefficiency and risk in their environment. GlassHouse believes that this offering will provide visibility into the complexities and inefficiencies of internal backup and recovery operations.

As customers realize the impact GlassHouse resources have on their environment, they may find that the analysis and recommendation processes are best handled by experts with a 360 degree view of IT environments around the globe. When this turns out to be the case, GlassHouse will provide expertise to perform this service. This total managed services option enables users to leverage GlassHouse intellectual property and learn how to best manage their backup environments from GlassHouse’s on-site experts with years of experience in hundreds of IT environments.

The end result is increased efficiency, error reduction and improvement in recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs). GlassHouse’s solution also ensures that applications are properly aligned with the appropriate RPO/RTO (Figure One), and that the necessary resources are in place to attain these targets. ESG believes that, when properly executed, the user benefits in areas such as compliance, internal service level agreements, etc.

Figure One: Recovery Time Objectives and Recovery Point Objectives

The Bottom Line

GlassHouse offers IT departments the choice to leverage its expertise or its total managed service offering in regards to the backup process. GlassHouse’s years of experience in the services business should make for a seamless transition to the role of MSP in conjunction with its traditional services model.

The backup market has re-emerged, as various forces, including heightened SLAs and the emergence of the remote office, have collided to bring the discipline back to the forefront. GlassHouse will have to be wary of traditional backup vendors that see this huge opportunity looming in the backup MSP space. In addition, some of the traditional storage players are finally acknowledging the significance of managed service backup, which should merit cautious observation from GlassHouse of the competitive landscape

Most backup issues are discovered during a crisis. ESG believes that the deployment of GlassHouse’s MSP model can allow IT departments to manage their painful, tactical backup environments proactively rather than always reacting to a crisis, with folks who know the intricacies of the environment—and let their internal IT people concentrate on higher value strategic initiatives.