Channel Post speaks to Charbel Khneisser, the Regional Presales Director, for Middle East, Turkey and North Africa at Riverbed Technology about the Hyber-Converged Infrastructure market in the region
How big is the Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) market in the Middle East?
We see the need for hyper-convergence, particularly in the area of branch IT convergence arising out of the strong performance of Middle East organizations that have now begun expanding their global footprints. For these businesses, the ability to have remote offices in several locations delivers a range of benefits, including access to a wide network of professional talent and potential customers.
A global presence is key in today’s international marketplace, with customers ordering goods from around the world and at the same time, expecting a seamless user experience. To make branch offices as effective as possible, workers need to have quick access to all the business information they need to perform their job. Traditionally this has been achieved by providing and maintaining technology locally.
However, costs can start to add up and spiral out of control when you look at the price of servers and storage, backups and the IT staff managing hardware and software. Worse, when disaster strikes, recovery of branch data and applications can take days, putting the branch at risk.
With so much at stake, it no longer makes sense for today’s organisations to rely on traditional methods of technology deployment and management. When each branch operates and maintains its own equipment and data storage, the result is islands of technology that are rarely updated and patched at the same rate. The outcome is constant management churn and increased risk that a disaster at any one of these locations can significantly impact the business.
It is for these reasons that businesses are turning to convergence technologies that allow them to consolidate servers, storage and network infrastructure into a single appliance.
What factors are responsible for the growing acceptance of HCI versus traditional storage systems in the region?
Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) is the latest buzz in IT circles. Businesses are now able to integrate multiple IT components into a single entity to remove silos, optimize costs, and improve productivity; thanks to virtualization and cloud computing technology.
Hyper-converged infrastructures provide this flexibility to businesses. In a traditional IT environment, businesses need to hire experts to manage network, compute, storage, and virtualization solutions. Besides increasing costs, it also creates silos that impact overall productivity of the organization.
As you integrate components into a single entity, IT management is simplified for admins, while the organization benefits from increased productivity on the other hand impacting support services cost. With the promise of less hardware, reducing the cost of equipment and power, as well as consuming less IT staff resources, the benefits of hyper convergence, which is not limited to storage alone, are many and significant.
Currently, the technology has remained focused on the data centre with little applicability to the branch. And this is a shame given that majority of business today is actually conducted at the branch. The focus for Riverbed in the area of hyper convergence deals specifically with the edge.
That is, we help our customers simplify their branch IT footprint, converge branch servers and storage into a single appliance while centralizing their data. This presents benefits as infrastructure is simplified from remote sites while keeping a company’s data protected, IT and business teams agile, as well as still allowing users to remain productive, irrespective of their circumstance or distance involved.
Hyper-converged systems are based on industry-standard servers and hence some partners worry that profitability will not match traditional storage offerings. Is this statement true? How does your company work with channel partners to ensure this isn’t the case?
For at least a couple years now, it has been becoming increasingly evident to channel players that competing on price alone is no longer feasible. This not only slashes profit margins but ends up being detrimental to the end-customer as resellers are unable to or simply not motivated enough to provide the highest quality of work.
In reaction to this change, the channel has had to invest in skills development. With the right skills available in its resource pool, a channel partner can begin to offer new services and a high level of value addition which helps create new revenue streams and keep the organization at the forefront of innovation.
This is true of all areas of IT, including hyper convergence where there is plenty of room for partners to develop expertise and thus add value to projects. This is why at Riverbed, we have adapted our channel strategy to increase our focus and engagement with partners who drive value to the business. As a result, it is really about the partnership driving value not volume.
The same can be said for our value-add distributors, as we now work closer with those who bring additional value to Riverbed. This helps them become more relevant and further increase their focus and outcome.
What sort of value-added services does HCI introduce to the market?
Although HCI can be very good, it only makes sense for the software defined data centre, the keyword data centre. While it is a great service delivery apparatus, none of the HCI vendors has focused on the service consumption side. The consumers of these services primarily reside outside of the data centre at remote offices- the important business front lines.
HCI devices, inherently, are stateful beings, meaning they house real application data and company’s intellectual property. The real task for IT is to get the data out of branch and remote offices. Putting these in remote offices renders the branch stateful. Stateful branches contain real data which renders them highly susceptible to data loss and security breaches.
Riverbed focuses on projecting the benefits of the hyper-converged data centre out to remote offices without compromising user experience. This opens up new possibilities for channel partners who can now extend the conversation with customer from consolidation in the data centre alone, to now talking about eliminating branch IT and introducing backup and recovery at remote locations by utilizing the existing HCI infrastructure. Needless to say, this is an extremely cost effective solution to some of the most pressing business challenge and thus a huge opportunity for the channel.
When it comes to support services for HCI, how is it handled by your company? Do you have any certification program in place?
Riverbed SteelFusion provides a unique approach to hyper-convergence, leveraging the converged infrastructure not only to deliver compute, block storage and management in a tightly integrated stack but also capability to integrate Riverbed SD-WAN in the same appliance making it pure “Branch In a Box” solution.
Riverbed SteelFusion is an eccentric solution addressing branch office needs, simplifying branch architecture delivering similar performance and making a direct impact on support services in branches as in this scenario everything will be managed, controlled and provisioned from the data centre.
