Dell Integrates Partner's Replication As A Service Into EqualLogic

Dell has signed a deal to resell one of its solution provider's replication-as-a-service offerings by integrating the service into Dell EqualLogic SAN arrays.

The partner, Houston-based iland, has worked with Dell since 2007 and started talking to Dell about two years ago about bringing its service on board, said Dante Orsini, vice president of business development at iland.

The annual service includes an IPSec VPN, unlimited cloud bandwidth and replication of up to 2 TB of storage. Additional storage is available in 1-TB increments, according to iland, and also leverages additional technology from VMware.

"We automated everything on our side. Dell makes sure customers are qualified technically for the service. We're excited about it," Orsini said.

Iland is a former infrastructure provider that changed its business model after the economy soured in 2008, Orsini said from the main stage at Dell's recent Dell World conference in Austin. At that time a lot of customers started looking for more cost-effective disaster recovery and replication solutions that didn't require significant investment. Iland used several vendors' technologies back then but quickly found that Dell was most interested in sharing go-to-market activities.

"In the SMB market, organizations wanted an easy way to do backup data" Orsini told CRN at Dell World.

The Dell/iland relationship continued to blossom over the next several years until both companies recognized that the market was ready for replication-as-a-service, Orsini said.

"We've been doing this at an arm's length with Dell for some time. We collaborated in the field. We saw the opportunity," Orsini said.

It's uncommon that a vendor, particularly one the size of Dell, will resell or integrate one of its partner's offerings into a product, but Orsini said that was his vision from the beginning.

"I absolutely thought we'd be here one day. The synergies are far too great. Dell being customer focused, they had to make sure they had a partner of the right caliber. We had to prove ourselves for two years. But the timing is right, and it's all being driven by the customer now," he said.

On a Direct2Dell blog on Dell's website, Kara Krautter, senior communications advisor at Dell, notes that the new iland offering helps address security concerns by providing "a simple, secure, and cost effective cloud-based protection solution built for your virtual environment."

With an EqualLogic Array and iland RaaS, "growing organizations can securely replicate their data offsite and add an extra level of data security to their disaster recovery strategies," according to the blog.

The solution is easy to set up, has flexible management features and, most importantly, maximum security as all replicated data is housed in iland's secure SSAE 16 certified data centers, according to Dell.