VSkyMotion adds workload migration, disaster recovery, and hybrid cloud to the VSkyCube Infrastructure.
Promise Technology has been a long-time specialty player in the storage space, with a deep focus on the media and entertainment industry. Last year, they expanded their reach, introducing their VSkyCube hyper-converged infrastructure. Now they have introduced VSkyMotion, a new software bundle that runs on top of VSkyCube and provides workload migration, disaster recovery and hybrid cloud capabilities.
“When we entered the hyper-converged space last year, we counted 27 other players, some of whom have since been absorbed, like SimpliVity, or gone out of business,” said Jason Pan Senior Director, Product Marketing and Business Development at Promise. “There are a lot of players. We decided though, that just as in storage we have a niche where we don’t compete with EMC or NetApp, we would do the same in hyper-converged. We are not going after the Fortune 500, but after the SME, down to the higher end of the SOHO space. There are companies in that space, like Scale Computing and Pivot3, but there are a lot less of them.”
Behrouz Zali, Promise’s Senior Director, Americas, Channel Sales and Marketing
“Hyper-converged offers a unique opportunity for our partners,” said Behrouz Zali, Promise’s Senior Director, Americas, Channel Sales and Marketing. “It has value propositions around three areas: our traditional rich media portfolio, IP solutions and physical security surveillance, and our top partners all have a strength in one or two of those areas.”
“We announced VSkyCube last April, but it didn’t actually ship until Q4 of last year,” Pan said. “During that time in the market we have seen it have particular success in surveillance. They have a real need for analytics there. It could take a city two or three hours to find an image of an incident that they needed before on their whole camera system.” The education vertical is another where they have had some initial success.
“This quarter, we are approaching partners to suggest they use the same “Try and Buy” strategy that LeftHand Networks used to use,” Zali said. He saw good results from that policy, where the customer tried it for 30 days and then either bought it or returned it, when he worked with LeftHand while he was at Bell Micro. “By the middle of this quarter, we should have more references for VSkyCube. We are confident that this is ready for prime time and will shine.”
Zali also noted that as a reward for pioneering the hyper-converged product, Promise is offering partners very high margins through high registered discounts.
The new VSkyMotion software sits on top of VSkyCube.
“VSkyMotion provides a way to migrate workloads from physical and virtual machines to VSkyCube, as well as private cloud disaster recovery options,” Pan said. “It’s very different from the old way, where SMEs had to have redundant infrastructure. Now the backup can be a fraction of the primary site. It makes it both easier to migrate to VSkyBox, and from VSkyBox to the Amazon Cloud. You can now burst into the Amazon cloud, instead of having to put full disaster recovery there.”
The VSkyMotion software’s automation of the formerly painstaking process of migrating from physical or virtual infrastructure to the VSkyCube hyper-converged infrastructure should spur sales of VSkyCube.
“We are very excited about this, because the removal of the major migration hurdle will make VSkyCube simpler to adopt,” said Sudhir Prasad, Senior Director, Product Management and Marketing at Promise. “It will also make it much easier for customers to use the public cloud for backup or disaster recovery.”
Pan said that the software’s ability to easily set up a secondary site for disaster recovery is also a major asset for partners.
“For partners, disaster recovery isn’t a simple thing to do, and some haven’t done it for their customers,” he said. “If the partner doesn’t engage with the customer on this, they may look at Amazon or Google for it. This is the time to engage with them, and still own the relationship, even if it is more like an MSP relationship.”
VSkyMotion is available now. Its migration and disaster recovery tools are available free of fees to VSkyCube customers for one year.
