StorageCraft takes on mid-market incumbents with data channel play

Marina Brook (StorageCraft)

StorageCraft has unveiled a new selection of data management platform offerings, targeting mid-market customers through the channel.

Spanning the Asia Pacific market - including Australia, New Zealand and ASEAN regions - the solutions are designed to remove customer challenges around data management, protection and recovery.

Specifically, OneXafe is a converged data platform providing scale-out storage for both physical and virtual environments, while ShadowXafe operates as an advanced next-generation data-protection solution.

“This new technology will bring much needed relief to mid-sized organisations,” said Marina Brook, head of sales Asia Pacific at StorageCraft. “These businesses are struggling, often drowning, in complexity, cost and risk associated with ageing back-up infrastructures.”

From a partner perspective, Brook said the solution is delivered through value-added resellers and managed service providers (MSPs), as an alternative to competitive vendors such as Cohesity, Rubrik and Veeam.

“Over the last 10 years we have gained a strong reputation for being a leader in data recovery, on-premises, off-premises and cloud technologies through the small business sector,” Brook added. “Now, this next-generation platform provides the opportunity to solve mid-market challenges through our partners.

“We’re now in a position to drive growth through the small, medium and enterprise markets, allowing the channel to service the entire spectrum of customers.”

Brook said the combined offering provides partners with a single integrated solution to take to market, spanning primary and secondary storage, in addition to back-up, recovery and cloud disaster recovery as-a-service (DRaaS).

“Partners now only need to skill up on one vendor technology, rather than being challenged to understand the complexities of multiple offerings,” Brook explained.

“Other benefits for the channel include the ability to expand customer conversations due to the flexibility and scalability of the platform.”

According to Douglas Brockett - president of StorageCraft - mid-market customers previously had the option of buying data storage and protection solutions “piecemeal”, while vendors expected these already resource-strapped organisations to be their own system integrator.

“Their alternative was to buy limited ‘secondary only’ data platforms priced for large enterprises from vendors such as Rubrik and Cohesity, which all too often left them with complexity and high cost of ownership,” Brockett added.

“For the first time ever, there is an alternative. OneXafe puts an end to vendor silos and protected markets.”

Delving deeper, OneXafe aims to differentiate in the market through integrating primary, secondary and cloud data-management capabilities.

“The data protection and recovery software market is expected to continue strong growth through 2021,” added Phil Goodwin, research director at IDC. “As businesses suffer the damage inflicted by downtime, they will increasingly embark on ‘the new race to zero’ - near zero RPO and RTO.

“StorageCraft's OneXafe aims to shift the paradigm of traditional data protection by converging data platforms for primary and secondary storage while integrating data protection. It is a development worth watching closely.”