Storage: the final frontier

HP is another vendor pushing storage assessment type services with increasing success. Such services, what's more, opened the door to offering other services, including install, implementation and managed services, according to storage services business development manager, Corie Marinuci.

Many companies now want help with their storage management and strategy - especially as compliance issues came to the fore, he said.

"It's about providing organisations with a view of their operation and how they use storage technology and existing SAN, for example. Also, data profiling is becoming more popular, especially with organizations wanting to increase storage capacity and looking long term," Marinuci said.

Even small home or office customers today could be trying to manage 500GB or 1TB of data. Often outsourcing that, especially when it came to backup, archiving and recovery, could prove cost-effective for the customer and worth a punt for the reseller, Marinuci said. HP hasn't opened up its consulting services to the channel, however.

HP StorageWorks marketing manager, Mark Nielsen, said a lot of HP partners already offered their own storage services and HP didn't want to preclude resellers from doing that. Storage services increasingly drive hardware sales as well, no matter who is delivering the service, he said.

"It's an opportunity for our channel partners to have a higher level of discussion with customers about storage. I think the opportunity for resellers is very big," Nielsen said.

Exploration of possibilities

Sun Microsystems partner sales director, Sam Srinivasan, spotted a major trend towards data optimisation. The vendor offers SAN and backup services. Sun had lots of integration services for when customers purchase products, and is also looking at support services, he said.

For Srinivasan, the biggest demand for services is at the top end of the SME and enterprise space, especially around backup.

"We do use the channel for a number of these services, to deliver them on our behalf," he said. "We're seeing it split across the telecommunications, financial services industry, education and government." IBM storage and servers business development executive, Terry Graham, is also seeing strong growth in storage services. IBM is offering services attached to certain products, such as service pack implementations including professional services and annuity-based storage and data managed services. They may soon be made available via channel partners, he said.

Select resellers will also be able to offer IBM's Scale-out File Services (SoFS) to help make high performance customer NAS more efficient. IBM also recently acquired Softek, with channel deals in the offing for resellers to deliver host-based data mobility services, Graham said

"For that, we plan pre-packaged services product, with a pre-defined statement of works, so it's easy for the channel to sell to customers," he said. Last October, IBM also acquired storage analysis and reporting services developer, NovusCG. Graham said partner opportunities from that buy might surface towards the end of the year.

Seeking new life

EMC product director, Clive Gold, said storage services is a "very big" and growing area, with many variations possible on the theme. Like IBM, EMC has been making acquisitions around storage services, including online storage backup-as-a-service developer, Berkeley Data Systems. Its remote backup app, Mozy, was an interesting buy for a company such as EMC, Gold said, because most customers were consumers - the app is very much a low-end play.

"Technically, it's online storage, but it's provided as a complete service," Gold said.

EMC has also bought Avamar, which offers data de-duplication capabilities to identify redundant data at the source, enabling customers to minimise and treamline backup processes across the network. It expected data de-duplication would be in high demand as a service as the year progressed, Gold said. Enstor Advantage client services manager, Tim Davoren, said business is booming in storage services - January was the busiest month for a long time for the service provider.

The company does data migrations, recovery, forensic memory searching and offers storage services around virtualisation, managed backup and replication.

Activity in the low end, especially in data protection, was growing, while exponential growth in server virtualization and demand for storage skills was also boosting an active, buoyant market, Davoren said.

"And there are more players in the market now because the cost of bandwidth has shrunk again over the last few years," he said.

Another refresh cycle around infrastructure is tipped to start, Davoren said, since the last big equipment refresh was around 2003-05, after the big 2000 refresh. Hardware is relatively cheap, but services are needed to go along with the new gear.

To sell storage services meant understanding that they didn't offer direct ROI, Davoren said. Instead, storage services are more of a TCO proposition.

The challenge for resellers is to ensure an offering is worth more than if customers did the same thing for themselves.

"Storage services are often far down the list of priorities, so you must maintain the quality of the service and drive down costs," he said.

The good news for the channel is that few large outsourcers have been doing data management-type storage services particularly well - offering real opportunities to canny third parties that dig deep into the needs of the midsize business in particular, Davoren said. "I think if compliance can be turned into a service issue it will make that opportunity even bigger," he said.