MSPs: Why OneXafe Solo Is the Right BDR Appliance for Your Customers

MSPs are facing plenty of challenges when it comes to delivering backup and disaster recovery (BDR) services to their clients. Your reputation is on the line. If your customers can’t get back in business in the time frame you’ve agreed to after a data loss event, you’ve got problems. And with the move to a remote workforce and tons of new devices being added to networks, just keeping everything secure is hard.  

Additionally, a lot of BDR appliances bring their own challenges. So we took our own path. First, we looked at the problems that BDR appliances weren’t solving. Next, we conducted an in-depth research study with our partner ecosystem to find out what they wanted to see in a solution that would clearly stand out from the competition. Then we built StorageCraft OneXafe Solo from the ground up. OneXafe Solo is our unique direct-to-cloud approach to appliance-based data protection.

Problems with Provisioning

The first thing we heard loud and clear was that MSPs are spending a ton of time and effort trying to assess each of their customer’s specific needs. Not just today, but in a year or two. How many machines will that customer need? And, based on its growth plans, how many will it need in the future? How fast are its storage capacity needs going to grow? On the flip side, what if your customer gets into a tough spot and needs to scale down? It isn’t easy to find the right solution, especially when future requirements are so hard to predict.  

We also came across partners that were using anywhere from three to five and even more different BDR solution models, just so they could right-size and adjust as their customers’ needs changed. For MSPs, that means unnecessary costs and inefficiency.

Lock-in Brings Limitations

Our partners also told us that many of today’s off-the-shelf solutions are constrained by a given solution’s limited ecosystem. These MSPs can’t leverage additional resources they may have at their disposal—like their own data center, or other local storage—for efficiency and to help their clients differentiate themselves in the marketplace. That was an important struggle we wanted to address.

High-Touch Takes Time

We found many MSP partners that build their own BDRs. But managing the different flavors and sizes, updating software and drivers on machines, replacing faulty hardware, and providing a semblance of centralized management for those appliances takes ongoing commitment and expertise. Do-it-yourself may have been attractive at one point, but it often becomes an unreasonable burden as MSPs look to use their resources more strategically.

We designed OneXafe Solo to overcome all of these issues at a price point that is attractive to an MSP’s customers, while delivering great margins and recurring revenue opportunities for MSPs, too.

Why OneXafe Solo Stands Out—And Helps You Stand Out

We designed OneXafe Solo in an attractive, small form-factor to make it easy to handle. And we gave it the flexibility to provide data protection across a wide range of environments—physical and virtual, agent and agentless, on a variety of platforms—as shown at the top of the diagram below.

At the bottom of the diagram you’ll see the storage options OneXafe Solo supports for backup and replication destinations. One of OneXafe Solo’s best features is direct-to-cloud backups. That means your client doesn’t need any local backup storage onsite. But there are plenty of other options, including outfitting Solo with an internal drive, connecting to local NAS, or even plugging a USB drive into it. For an MSP that means one appliance, one model, and one purchase to cover many of your customers’ use cases and environments.

On the left side of the diagram is StorageCraft OneSystem. OneSystem is a management environment that eliminates infrastructure and deployment requirements for our MSP partners. With OneSystem you can manage any number of OneXafe Solo appliances from a central location, dynamically providing protection for new machines as they are added. And deployment is a snap, both onsite at the client’s premises, and at your own facility.

Cloud Services Are the Capper

Last, but certainly not least, that brings us to the right side of the diagram and StorageCraft Cloud Services. Our disaster recovery cloud eliminates performance problems, workload and orchestration limitations, and management capability shortfalls. And OneXafe Solo integrates seamlessly with StorageCraft Cloud Services. That means you can offer an offsite backup storage cloud solution purpose-built for disaster recovery, including one-click orchestrated failover.

Summing Up OneXafe Solo

MSPs are always looking for new ways to increase margins and recurring revenues. OneXafe Solo gives you more opportunities for both. Find out more about becoming a StorageCraft partner today.