HPE brought the two vendors together to design a validated solution on HPE Proliant servers, which combines Zerto’s high resiliency with StorMagic’s lightweight software for edge deployments.
Brian Grainger, StorMagic’s CRO
Edge-focused hyperconverged infrastructure [HCI] vendor StorMagic and continuous data protection [CDP] vendor Zerto have announced a joint solution that has been validated on HPE Proliant servers. The collaborative offering will be sold through the HPE Complete Program.
StorMagic has been in the HPE Complete program, which takes third party solutions to market through both HPE channel and direct sellers when they fill a gap in HPE’s own offerings, since early 2020. Zerto, however, has been in the HPE Complete program since 2017.
“It has been a significant contribution to us, particularly as we have matured our backup store as well, and gone into the secondary storage market,” said Andy Fernandez, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Zerto. “Our integration with HPE StoreOnce was our first integration into that backup market.”
“StorMagic’s revenue component through HPE Complete is quite good, but we are also seeing broader advantages, such as assurance testing certification to bring two partners in the ecosystem together,” said Brian Grainger, StorMagic’s CRO.
This is the first collaborative relationship with another vendor in the HPE Complete program for both companies. StorMagic and Zerto actually came together in this relationship through matchmaking by HPE.
“Zerto has an excellent enterprise class piece of software, and we are all about the edge, and are expanding out our product portfolio,” Grainger said. “Customers have an increasing demand for data security, DR and traditional backups. So it was a natural fit for HPE to bring us together.”
Grainger said that there is some conflict between StorMagic’s SvSAN solution, and HPE SimpliVity, which is now being positioned as an edge product. But he said that it’s marginal, because they really don’t go after the same deals.
“When we originally rolled SvSAN out with HPE Complete, we were brought in as a replacement for StoreVirtual,” he noted. “If they had decided to continue to invest in that, there wouldn’t have been a place for SvSAN. There will always be a little conflict, but it’s a fairly small percentage of overlap between SimpliVity and SvSAN. StoreVirtual was the competitive product.”
Grainger sees SimpliVity as a marginal competitor for SvSAN in most edge use cases where StorMagic plays well.
“It’s the same issue that Nutanix is having at the edge,” he said. “It’s taking a data centre product and pushing it out, but you can’t change the core of the product, SimpliVity does have more features than SvSAN, but most edge deployments usually don’t need them. In contrast, we are very lightweight. You could run us on a Raspberry Pi. Now no one does do this – and I wouldn’t suggest it – but you could.”
The second issue where SvSAN benefits against SimpliVity is pricing, Grainger said.
“They offer a data centre product at a data centre price premium. We keep our head down and work with HPE reps, and we close big deals together. There will be some overlap, but that’s not the thing that keeps me awake at night.”
While StorMagic’s base was in smaller deployments, and Zerto’s traditional base was in the high end of the market, both companies see their solutions as overlapping.
Andy Fernandez, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Zerto
“Zerto was developed originally as high-end resilience, but the execution and resources spent on it the same for all parts of the market,” Fernandez said. “StorMagic is extremely simple. Zerto is the same, especially given compared to competitors like Rubrik or Cohesity. You replicate with us within two hours. You don’t need professional services. Now we have restructured the product to provide a better TCO downmarket. We provide high end resilience, but anyone in SMB can use us the same way.”
Fernandez also stressed that Zerto can handle increasing SLA requirements.
“Those will only increase as data volumes increase and it becomes more valuable,” he said. “Everything will require significant SLAs and availability. We can deliver modern SLAs. It’s no longer sufficient to lose a day of backups when recovering data.”
The new product is available immediately now through HPE Complete Partners. Zerto and StorMagic are conducting a webinar on the solution on June 8, 2021 at 11:00 EST.
