Artisan Infrastructure Targets VARs, MSPs With Data Backup Partnership

Artisan Infrastructure has joined forces with StorageCraft Technology to help bring cloud-based data backup, disaster recovery and migration services to managed service providers (MSPs).

Artisan specializes in infrastructure-as-a-service, and is pitching the alliance as a partnership that will enable MSPs and value-added-resellers (VARs) to offer storage services to customers based on the StorageCraft ShadowProtect technology.

’As a wholesale infrastructure partner, we realize that the solution providers themselves have had limited choices with regard to getting into the data backup business ,’ said Brian Hierholzer, CEO of Artisan. ’It’s been an extremely expensive proposition so the majority of them have had to go to a solution provider that has been specific to storage for example and resell those solutions.

’The challenge(s) with reselling those solutions are number one, margin, number two, control, (and) number three, access to the systems and recoverability...So what we do as Artisan Infrastructure, we enable our solution provider partners to pick and choose their own solutions,’ he explained. ’We don’t dictate any data backup solution that they can build within their virtual private data center environment.’

According to Artisan, the deal with StorageCraft will permit MSPs and VARs to remotely test, evaluate and monitor the ShadowProtect line of backup and disaster recovery software securely within Cornerstone -- Artisan's virtual Private Data Center platform -- before purchasing it. ShadowProtect is pre-installed and publicly available through a certified solution template, in Artisan Infrastructure's solution ecosystem, making the solution deployable in less than a few minutes, the company said.

Expetec Vice President Todd Sayler, whose company announced a partnership with Artisan back in February, called disaster recovery one of the ’largest segments in the IT market.’

’Almost all businesses rely heavily on their IT for daily operations and any outage can cause dramatic impacts to their profitability,’ he said. ’Expetec is very involved in providing backup solutions as well as recovery solutions to SMBs. Being able to provide backup and virtualization in the cloud is but one of the solutions we have in our collection of solutions. Our system has been and will continue to be proactive in this segment.’

Artisan said it does not resell any solutions, and wholesale infrastructure partners will maintain a direct purchase relationship with StorageCraft.

"Our partnership enables MSPs and VARs to give their customers the real-time, hands-on experience of remotely deploying ShadowProtect's cloud-based backup and recovery services from Cornerstone,’ said Curt James, vice president of marketing and business development at StorageCraft, in a statement. ’It empowers our channel partners to create end-to-end solutions that provide a broader choice of flexible, efficient and affordable cloud backup services for the customer.’