Managed Service Providers

What InMage Can Do For MSPs (2:40 min)

Tom Urban
Vice President, Cloud Service

As a Managed Service Provider (MSP), you offer your customers all the advantages of a scalable, high performance IT infrastructure without any of the capital expense requirements. On-line backup and disaster recovery services are a perfect fit for the MSP model since you can offer feature-rich data protection and recovery services, with the sophisticated expertise to manage it, to your customers on a “pay as you go” basis. This offers recovery capabilities your customers might not otherwise be able to afford, allows them to scale these services up or back very easily, and makes costs predictable over time.

For MSPs that can provision storage resources, InMage offers interesting, next generation technologies that address key data protection and recovery problems like backup windows, data loss on recovery, poor recovery times, and recovery reliability. Leveraging technologies like continuous data protection (CDP), heterogeneous asynchronous replication, and application failover/failback, among others, InMage enables MSPs to offer transparent data protection to their end user customers that supports near zero data loss on recovery and provides recovery within minutes, even from remote site (MSP) locations.

For MSPs that can provision virtual server resources and support cloudbursting, InMage offers Cloud Optimized Infrastructure. Cloud Optimized Infrastructure brings application services into the mix, allowing MSPs to offer more solutions-oriented services for their end user customers across recovery, administrative, and production off-load use cases. These types of services go beyond just provisioning resources to provide excellent options to end users for minimizing in-house IT infrastructure while at the same time they differentiate you from your MSP competitors.

What Is Cloud Optimized Infrastructure?

To date, most managed services are built around resource provisioning.  While this offers interesting options to end users, it potentially leaves a lot of business on the table. If you’re an MSP that can provision virtual servers on demand, InMage offers you a set of infrastructure foundation technologies that will allow you to easily bring application service provisioning into the mix, offering not only a set of solutions-oriented recovery services, but expanding your tiered services offerings to include options for administrative and production off-load use.

Cloud Optimized Infrastructure is based around 5 key tenets that offer capabilities that differentiate you as an MSP from your competition:

  • Flexible licensing which supports the elastic expansion/contraction of cloud-based services and accommodates the billing implications
  • Low overhead in deployment and use across server, network, and storage resources, making it a great fit for virtual machine environments that are a key supporting technology in cloud-based computing
  • Non-disruptive scalability which accommodates the need for server, storage and other infrastructure growth on both the end user and cloud provider sides without impacting client-side production servers
  • Enterprise multi tenancy that provides for the secure delivery of reliable services to multiple customers with a scalable management model
  • Broad heterogeneous support that maximizes cloud provider market opportunities by covering a wide range of server, storage, and application environments found in customer settings

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MSPs that offer Cloud Optimized Infrastructure based around InMage as a technology foundation can give offer the following options:

  • Low overhead recovery solutions that meet disaster recovery and/or business continuity requirements that do the following:
    • Eliminate backup windows and other production impacts
    • Meet the most stringent RPO/RTO requirements
    • Offer application-aware solutions that simplify recovery operations
  • Application services which can be provisioned in the cloud at the push of a button to meet administrative needs (test or development environments) or expand/contract production capacity to meet seasonal demands as required

InMage combines a number of next generation recovery technologies that will help your customers eliminate tape-based infrastructure, meet evolving recovery requirements, and/or expand application services capacity without impacting capital budgets. And InMage’s flexible licensing model allows these services to be easily started or stopped on demand, providing more granularity than what you may have been able to offer your customers in the past.

Because of InMage’s unique architecture, MSPs can offer end users a single deployment model which can accommodate a whole range of tiered services and heterogeneous environments. End users can move between these tiers without impacting production, a capability which is unique to Cloud Optimized Infrastructure.

What Service Does Cloud Optimized Infrastructure Enable?

Recovery

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With the simple installation of a single filter driver on client side servers, you can offer a whole host of tiered services, as well as migration between these services without ever having to touch client side servers again. The filter driver, called an InMage data tap, replaces backup agents, replication agents, and any other snapshot tools that may have been loaded on your customers’ servers for data protection purposes, providing a much lower overhead way to capture data that is a perfect fit for physical and virtual servers alike.

With the data tap installed, you can offer simple on-line backup services, as well as services that can automatically fail applications over into the cloud where they can be hosted while your clients are recovering from the effects of a disaster at their primary site. Given InMage’s use of CDP technology, you can provide near zero data loss on recovery, at either local or remote sites, which allows you to offer service level agreements for data and application recovery across different tiers.

Through the addition of professional services, you can offer very sophisticated business continuity solutions, leveraging your facilities and ability to host applications as the disaster recovery site for many businesses that could otherwise not afford one.

Administration

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Many enterprises retain test beds that are used for maintenance purposes, to test performance optimizations, and other development work. Depending on how often this environment is used, it may be underutilized, a fact which decreases the overall efficiency of the IT infrastructure and increases costs. Small and large enterprises alike can benefit from the ability to rapidly bring test environments that meet their requirements up within the cloud, and may be able to dynamically provision larger test harnesses than they could support in house to test applications at scale and address other maintenance and development needs.

What’s different about what InMage enables with Cloud Optimized Infrastructure is again based on the ease of use of provisioning not just resources, but solutions built around specific application environments. Instead of the manual effort required to create an Exchange test bed in the cloud, an end user could provision that almost literally with the push of a button which mounts their selected data set on a virtual server in the cloud running Windows and then brings up an instance of Exchange. Once the test process is complete, that environment can be quickly de-commissioned, with InMage’s flexible licensing model providing very granular billing options.

Production Off-load

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For certain businesses, spikes in seasonal demand require significantly more IT infrastructure than is required for most of the rest of the year. Instead of building out the in-house infrastructure to meet these spikes, Cloud Optimized Infrastructure allows them to “burst” into an MSP’s cloud, easily provisioning the application services (not just the servers) necessary to meet the increased demand. Again, InMage’s flexible licensing gives MSPs the ability to offer very granular billing options, enabling end users to create solutions to meet their needs very quickly, and then shut them down (and stop paying for them) once the need has been met.

What is different about what InMage enables with Cloud Optimized Infrastructure is that the application service can be easily brought up to support expanded production capacity. This is not just resource provisioning. Providing these types of services is an opportunity for MSPs to wrap additional professional services around this offering to make expanding production capacity extremely easy. InMage provides the right infrastructure foundation to support these types of offerings from MSPs.

InMage Foundation Technologies

This provides a quick summary of some of the benefits associated with each of one of these next generation recovery technologies. For more information about them, you can review one or more of the following InMage white papers:

A Cost Effective, Integrated Solution for Backup and Disaster Recovery White Paper
Protecting and Recovering Virtual Server Environments White Paper
Using InMage to Address Local Backup Requirements White Paper
Understanding CDP (Technical White Paper)

Note that InMage has been selling the foundation technologies in a software product for close to 5 years. Our cloud optimized infrastructure solutions leverage these same technologies with a different licensing approach and a multi tenant management interface. These white papers discuss the technology details within the software product, which are the same ones in use in the cloud optimized infrastructure.

InMage Cloud Optimized Infrastucture Resources
InMage Cloud Optimized Infrastructure Data Sheet
InMage Cloud Optimized Infrastructure White Paper
InMage Cloud Optimized Infrastructure Announcement Presentation
Leveraging Cloudbursting to Drive Down IT Costs Presentation (Given at Interface Anchorage 2010 in April)
Cloudbursting: The New Killer App for the Cloud? (Data Storage Connection Article)
InMage Builds on Core Strengths To Help Customers Leverage Cloudbursting (Kendall Square Article)
InMage Cloud Optimized Infrastructure FAQ