Avnet Rolls Out Data Protection for Midmarket

By Gina Roos

Avnet Technology Solutions has released a data protection platform for IBM business partners in the United States and Canada. The product is aimed at helping midmarket enterprises protect their data and information assets, while enabling partners to increase their data center and storage offerings and help boost storage sales in the midmarket.

The data protection solution takes aim at midmarket customers that are challenged with disaster recovery and business continuity—primarily due to limited resources, such as time, people and budget. It helps reseller partners address these challenges by providing all the software, hardware and services in an integrated package.

The base offering includes the IBM Storwize V7000 controller, remote mirroring software and IBM/Brocade SAN06B routers, which include encryption, data compression and bandwidth management. Avnet provides several services that depend on the reseller’s requirements. These services include the installation and implementation of the solution, as well as project management.

In some cases, Avnet’s services will help partners expand their IT services capabilities or provide them with additional bench strength as needed. Solutions can be customized based on reseller needs.

“To have the V7000, which is a great midmarket solution, coupled with the ability to do disaster recovery using the IBM/Brocade solution gives our resellers a lot of options,” said Colin Blair, brand director, IBM System Storage and Servers, Avnet Technology Solutions, Americas.

About 250 storage resellers in the IBM business unit will be “great candidates for this offering in the midmarket,” said Blair. He estimates the size of the midmarket disaster recovery market opportunity at about $400 million, with 2,000 midmarket customers looking to implement this kind of offering.

Blair said the solutions group tried to be very prescriptive about the reference architecture and the services it provides to help its partners address the midmarket storage and security market. “We tried to make it simple for our business partners to identify, sell and deliver this highly available solution with IBM,” he added.

“In the storage marketplace, virtualization is huge, as is disaster recovery,” Blair said. “This allows our partner base to go out and socialize a midmarket top-of-the-line storage solution with disaster recovery capabilities and IBM replication.” Avnet claims unique data replication features that securely transmit critical business data to remote sites over any distance.

Avnet’s goal was to identify the complete midmarket opportunity and then combine all the components into an integrated and complete package to accelerate the success of its resellers, said Blair. This includes the installation, implementation and configuration of policies to provide the replication, project management and other resources.

“Making it easy for them is the key message, and identifying what customers want [is essential],” he added.

Gina Roos, a contributing writer for Channel Insider, specializes in technology and the channel.