recovery options

100 NSB Resellers in Record Time!

June 22, 2011

Peter Eicher

Post by

Senior Product Specialist, Data Protection

Dave Courbanou, a.k.a. The VAR Guy, posted earlier this week about the latest Syncsort press release on NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup (NSB) and the tremendous customer and reseller momentum that we continue to see in the marketplace.

Dave does a nice job summarizing the news, but I wanted to add a bit more detail for our channel partners or those thinking about signing up (hurry, the line keeps getting longer!). Dave makes the following point:  “NSB is also allowing many NetApp resellers to move deeper into their existing customer relationships.”

Quite true! Let me explain two big reasons why a NetApp channel partner would want to consider NSB as part of their portfolio.

Reason #1: New Business

About half of NSB deals are net-new NetApp customers. That is, customers that do not have any NetApp disk on the floor will purchase NSB to protect the data that sits on other vendor disk: EMC, HP, Dell, direct attached, whatever.  NSB consolidates all the data protection and disaster recovery (if needed) onto a NetApp hardware platform with an easy to use interface and market leading recovery options. And since backup storage is usually a multiple of the primary in terms of size (all that retention, plus often a DR unit at a second site) the deals are lucrative to our partners. Another benefit: very often an NSB sale turns into a NetApp primary storage deal down the road because the user gets exposed to NetApp ease of use, efficiency and so on. We’ve seen this happen again and again.

Reason #2: Keep Out the Other Guy

Even if your customer is mostly NetApp, there’s usually some data footprint that’s not on NetApp. Maybe there’s some direct attached, maybe it’s internal C: drive data that that’s not on the SAN, maybe it’s just some other SAN storage still in the mix. Few users have 100% of their data on a single disk platform.

If this describes your NetApp customer, that non-NetApp disk represents a penetration point for other vendors or resellers to come in and try to sell data protection offerings. By selling NSB into that account, not only do you make your customer happy with a great data protection solution (which can leverage their existing NetApp disk assets by the way), but you also close the door on other vendors establishing themselves in your account.

So not bad for our VARs!  Win new accounts and protect current ones. Pretty sweet. No wonder we’ve signed up more than 100 VARs in record time. There is still plenty of room on the bandwagon too…

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VMworld, Day 2

September 1, 2010

Peter Eicher

Post by

Senior Product Specialist, Data Protection

17,000 people are registered at VMworld this year, and yesterday (Tuesday) it felt like nearly every one of them stopped by to see us. I exaggerate a bit, of course, but we did have hundreds of attendees stop by to hear about our new NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup. 

One theme that came out loud and clear in conversations I had was recovery, recovery, recovery.  Users are looking for better and faster ways to get back data and return systems to production.  Whether it’s a big SQL database that takes too many hours to restore or a single item from within SharePoint that can’t be restored at all, people are looking for answers.  More than once I was told “my backups are getting done using product-X,  but the restores don’t work.”  One attendee told me that his backup software hasn’t been able to successfully restore a Linux server “for years,” and the vendor can’t make it work. Problems indeed! 

That’s why we’ve focused so hard on recovery options with NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup. Data gets lost in many different ways, and you need different ways to get it back. One of the nice features we offer is what we call Instant Data Access.  Every time we run a backup job, it gets stored on the NetApp FAS 2040 device in the form of a snapshot, using NetApp SnapVault technology (the best snap technology in the industry, if you ask me).  Because the data is stored in native format, an operator can easily issue a mapping request via the Syncsort BEX management console.  You just pick your backup, select the “Map Drive” option, assign the drive letter you want (assuming a Windows environment), and in less than a minute a new drive appears on your server with access to the entire volume.

If you’re at the show, stop on by (booth #213) and we’ll be glad to show you a live demonstration of how it works.

Recovery was also a big part of the story in a blog post today by Lauren Whitehouse of the Enterprise Strategy Group about NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup.

I’ve known Lauren for many years.  She really understands the data protection space and always brings an interesting perspective to industry news. I was happy to see her last evening when she joined us at a Syncsort hosted reception for customers and partners at the Grand Hyatt (some amazing views of San Francisco from their restaurant on the 36th floor – if you’re in town, it’s well worth a visit).  We were also joined by executives from the companies involved in launching NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup, which included NetApp – naturally – as well as Arrow Enterprise Computing Solutions and Avnet Technology Solutions.

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