Tony Asaro - CEO at The INI Group
If you take a step back and think about it, most of the IT industry focuses on data center solutions. Nearly all of the R&D, investment and innovation tends to favor the data center. This often forces customers to use technology at remote sites that is often too expensive, complex and with capabilities that may not be appropriate for their environments.
In my view what makes StorMagic so valuable is that their VSA was designed for remote sites. This is manifested in not only what it does but also in what it doesn’t do. I’ve spoken to their customers and by far the most important thing to them is ease of use. However, we must keep in mind that ease of use means managing lots and lots of geographically dispersed sites that typically have no local IT staff. StorMagic is easy to manage whether you have 10 or 1,000 or 10,000 sites. How many IT storage vendors can make the same claim?
It also has to be cost effective. Again, since there can be a large number of remote sites the costs can scale pretty quickly. Since StorMagic is software-only and only requires two physical servers for the VSA, it can literally save customers millions of dollars. One of their customers, a major US retailer, estimates they will save approximately $10,000,000 just in capital costs. That is significant.
Another factor is rapid implementation across a large number of sites. StorMagic was able to get over 1,000 systems up and running and operational in less than 3 months. And all of this was done remotely requiring no physical installation from the IT personnel on site. I find it hard to imagine a hardware-based storage system achieving this.
The other main factor is high availability and reliability. This is considered a requisite for all storage systems but one of StorMagic’s customers pointed out to me that because they can stretch the cluster and place one server on one side of their storage (they are a retail customer) and the other server across the campus, he has created a campus-wide disaster recovery scenario that he cannot get with physical storage systems. At least not ones that he could afford.
I’m going to be talking about all of the above as well as the research report I just completed on this very subject on the webcast on June 27th. It would be great if you can join me for that. It will be interactive so you can asks questions as well.