Archives : 2010 : April

RDX Offers VARs a New ‘Cloud Services’ Opportunity

Eric Slack, Sr, Analyst – Storage Switzerland – RDX Offers VARs a New ‘Cloud Services’ Opportunity — As a VAR, RDX is an appealing product to sell. It’s loaded with unique features and it has enough flexibility to give you a compelling solution in almost any backup deal. But it’s also the technology behind a separate service offering that can complement your existing business. RDX Storage Alliance

An RDX array system can support on-site disk backup like a dedupe appliance. It can grow to unlimited capacity but still provide the compliant functionality of a WORM archive. And, for the simplest DR solution, it can be carried off-site in a backpack like a tape cartridge.

RDX systems that support replication can also provide an automated off-site DR capability to companies with a remote office location and a WAN connection. But this technology can also enable VARs to set up a remote DR service for these same end users that don’t have a remote site or don’t want to deal with setting one up. For essentially the cost of the target RDX device, a VAR can offer a valuable service to their existing RDX customers and add a recurring revenue stream to their business.

For those customers who bought an RDX system with the idea of eventually replicating backups off-site, this can be an appealing service offering. In addition to backups, their local RDX array, connected to a larger unit in the VAR’s data center can provide a ‘hybrid cloud’ infrastructure for archiving file data.

On-line backup and cloud archive services are proliferating across the internet. While some are really consumer services, others have fairly complete business-class feature sets. But they don’t have the relationships that local, on-the-ground VARs do. These suppliers can leverage their hands-on business model to offer the product set and integration support that internet-only providers cannot. Adding DR services and off-site archive storage with RDX is an interesting option for VARs to expand their business with existing customers and to approach a new group of potential customers.