Selling storage virtual appliances to the VMware ESX community

US-based analyst firm ESG estimates that, in their virtual server infrastructure, 59 percent of SMB end users are installing Direct Attached Storage (DAS), which typically costs a fraction of what an external SAN costs and is much easier to manage.

However, with DAS, ESX users can’t leverage its higher-end features. Users deploying active virtualisation have an average of 2 Terabytes of storage, an amount that is easily met by the internal capacity of a typical server. If SMBs were able to leverage this inexpensive, server-based storage rather than complex external storage systems, the adoption of server virtualisation would increase, especially in organisations looking for high availability.

Until now, customers needed an expensive and complex external SAN to enable features such as VMotion and Dynamic Resource Scheduler (DRS) for high-availability implementations.  But with high availability as a strategic consideration for smaller organisations, how can resellers help them meet their goals and benefit from this exceptional opportunity?

Storage Virtual Appliances (also known as Virtual Storage Appliances or VSAs) enable VMware users to leverage the internal storage of their ESX servers. SVAs create a virtual SAN by virtualising the available disk storage and presenting it as an iSCSI LUN, which becomes a datastore that can be shared over the network, enabling ESX users to leverage VMotion, DRS, etc. without the cost and complexity of an external SAN.

Virtual storage appliances give resellers the ability to turn a customer's bare-bones VMware implementation into a full-featured VMware infrastructure, by delivering shared storage in a relatively painless way. This solution not only does great service to customers but also broadens the application of server virtualisation, making it approachable for a larger audience of businesses.

The good news is that resellers can leverage the SVA opportunity in several ways such as choosing a product that has built-in ease of use and future-proofing scalability, offering an integrated solution so that the ESX user does not need to run multiple applications to manage their datastores, RAID and SAN, selecting a technology that enables customers to get more out of their existing infrastructure and automating routine tasks so the ongoing cost of management is reduced and the complexity minimised.

Resellers should also avoid the de-featured product trap, where the vendor has simply reduced the functionality of an existing enterprise product and pushed it into the SMB market. De-featuring a product doesn’t remove the complexity and what suggests that a smaller organisation can get by with limited functionality? Distributors and resellers that address these issues will benefit from phenomenal growth rates, higher services revenue and increased margins.

Choosing the correct technology and partner is a very important part of the recipe for success; the channel should not settle for the status quo. In the current economic climate end users are looking for ways to improve productivity without having to outlay significant capital and Storage Virtual Appliances are the way to address this requirement.