MSPs and VARs: Why Offering Converged Storage That Includes Immutability Should Be a Priority

A recent article in Channel Insider was headlined “Do Value-Added Resellers (VARs) Still Exist?” Some big names still call themselves VARs, like CDW and Ingram Micro. But the reality is—as the story explains—VARs have mostly become managed service providers (MSPs), too, as they look for ongoing revenue streams instead of one-time purchases.

Whether you call your business an MSP or a VAR, you’re part of a growing market. Analyst firm Research and Markets projects that the global managed services market will grow from just over $161 billion in 2021 to more than $311 billion by 2027, a 12.44 percent CAGR.

That spells opportunity for everyone, regardless of whether you’re an MSP, VAR, systems integrator (SI)—or any other reseller or service provider. At the same time, competition is tightening as more companies expand their offerings and the geographies they cover. That makes differentiating your company more important than ever. Offering converged storage that includes immutability can do just that.

Converged Storage With Immutability: Simpler, More Secure

A converged storage architecture combines your customers’ storage, compute, networking, and data management into a single system. Converged systems centralize IT management and are easier to deploy, provision, manage, and scale than siloed infrastructures.

There are many converged storage technology options on the market. But immutability needs to be part of your storage offering equation if you want your company to be known for reliability and guaranteed data recovery. Offering immutable storage ensures your customers can always get their backed-up data back, no matter what.

And converged storage infrastructures offer substantial benefits:

• Optimizes storage
  Admins can treat all data as a single data pool, so you can use storage space more efficiently no matter where the data is located.
• Scales easily
  Converged storage lets you choose the type of storage drive you want, so you can scale with your preferred drives even if they differ from your older ones.
• Simplifies storage management
  With a single dashboard, converged storage platforms can make it much easier to manage your data.

Unify Data Storage and Data Protection

Instead of working with multiple vendors and platforms for storage and backup, solutions like Arcserve OneXafe give you the ability to offer a powerful, all-in-one, immutable storage solution from a single vendor. Arcserve OneXafe delivers a highly scalable, available, and easily managed network-attached storage (NAS) solution that provides continuous data protection (CDP) for unified data resilience against ransomware or user errors, ensuring your customers’ data is always recoverable.

OneXafe’s file system is based on an immutable object store, with every object written only once and never modified. Any modification to the file system results in the creation of new objects. OneXafe CDP takes low-overhead snapshots every 90 seconds. Snapshots are a view of the customer’s file system at the instant the snapshot was taken. Since the underlying objects are immutable and can’t be changed, the snapshots inherit this immutability, so they can’t be altered or deleted by an external source. And snapshots let your customers go back to specific points in time and recover entire file systems in minutes.

When combined with Arcserve Unified Data Protection (UDP) software, you can offer your customers complete, comprehensive data protection and cybersecurity.

Become an Arcserve Technology Partner

Arcserve gives MSPs and VARs a powerful competitive advantage by offering the broadest set of best-in-class solutions to manage, protect, and recover all data workloads, from SMB to enterprise, regardless of location or complexity.

Learn more about how you become an Arcserve technology partner and further differentiate your company from the competition.