Wholesale infrastructure-as-a-service provider Artisan Infrastructure teamed up with Arrow Electronics to deliver its cloud-based data protection infrastructure to support NetApp customers.
The channel offering—which includes the NetApp data protection infrastructure and a suite of services designed to speed time-to-market, simplify billing and contracts, and reduce management overhead—is available through the ArrowSphere cloud services marketplace. The product suite allows traditional VARs to expand their businesses into the cloud, and enables cloud service providers to offer hybrid cloud (on-premise and remote) data protection capabilities to NetApp storage system users.
The ArrowSphere platform also allows channel providers to build solutions that leverage their brand, manage contracts and billing, maintain a direct relationship with their customers and build a business with margins aligned with their own value proposition, said Artisan.
Arrow is “putting a mechanism in place that is simplifying and aggregating the creation of these catalogs of services,” said Brian Hierholzer, CEO of Artisan Infrastructure. “Arrow understands the value proposition of the enablement side, and for us, it makes it easier to deliver a set of services within that catalog or portfolio in a very simplistic ordering mechanism from a product and service fulfillment standpoint.”
Through the relationship between Artisan and Arrow, partners have direct access to a multi-stage hybrid cloud recovery suite using NetApp storage and SnapMirror as the foundation for cloud-based data protection to support NetApp end-customer uptime. Additionally, the white label service provides VARs and IT service providers with the ability to custom brand a data-recovery solution.
Key features of the data-protection offering include a subscription-management engine to make it easier to do business, customized online shops or branded Web stores, white-label 100 percent wholesale-only services to eliminate any channel conflict, and complete control over building independent cloud services.
“The ability to deliver true hybrid cloud capabilities enables solution providers to enter new markets and become an essential resource for long-term solutions, allowing deeper account integration and a strengthened relationship with customers as trusted advisors,” Jim Livingston, vice president of North American services for Arrow’s Enterprise Computing Solutions business, said.
“The data-protection-as-a-service offering allows us to find a direct linkage into the selling motions and channel management of the broader NetApp community,” Livingston said. “Our NetApps business is an extremely large business, and we have several hundred VARs that participate and help us develop and drive this business.”
Gina Roos, a Channel Insider contributing writer, specializes in technology and the channel.