MSP Simplified
By: Dan Newton, CEO – HiveIO Inc.
For over ten years, I worked for managed service providers. I provided hybrid cloud services to some of the world’s largest organizations and best-known brands. Through this experience, I saw firsthand the significant challenges that MSPs face today.
Our teams provided managed services to hundreds of thousands of customers. These ranged from small to medium businesses to mid-market and enterprise clients. Rarely did two customers have identical requirements, infrastructure, or applications.
The vast majority of solutions across data centers globally were based on three-tier architecture. This meant scaling out teams of specialists. Think network, virtualization, storage, Windows, Linux, database, and security teams, to name a few.
Management layers were constantly added on top. This was necessary to deal with the ever-growing number of vendors. Throw in the mix of public cloud providers, especially for hybrid customers. They were releasing over 1,700 new features and functions yearly. The layers of complexity were ever increasing. This also brought major challenges to procurement and pricing teams.
Most customers did not actually need this level of complexity. Yes, some customers delivered custom, revenue-generating applications. These were containerized, with automation, continuous integration, and continuous deployment methodologies. However, these cases were, and remain, few and far between.
And if a customer wanted to deploy virtual desktops? I was the first person to say no. Too many vendors, too expensive, not enough margin, and too many handoffs between different teams. This is where Hive Fabric for MSPs offers a breakthrough.
The Promise vs. Reality of Incumbent HCI for MSPs
The incumbent Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) vendors promised to change the landscape. They aimed to simplify solutions and remove complexity. They were in my office pitching weekly. Some simply bolted a new module onto their existing catalog. They charged extra, adding more confusion to their licensing model. Others had a good product and support. However, you had to meet their specific and complex hardware requirements to get performance. This meant exorbitant costs. Between the complex licensing and significant CapEx requirements, I could not find a path to HCI across data centers. Nothing allowed me to move from a team of specialists to a team of generalists. My ultimate goal: reducing OpEx, reducing CapEx, and improving customer outcomes.
This is precisely why Hive Fabric clicked instantly for MSPs.
Hive Fabric: The All-in-One HCI Solution for Managed Service Providers
Hive Fabric provides virtual server and shared storage capability. It has its own connection broker. It serves virtual desktops out of the box with a bare metal installation on any x86 hardware. There’s no requirement for other vendors. All this is done at a click of a button; no specialist teams are required. This makes Hive Fabric for MSPs a true game-changer.
Not only was this packaged in an easy-to-consume, predictable procurement model—by physical server, by month—but it also answered one of the hardest data center questions: data management.
We always knew data was key, primarily for monitoring. This goes to getting all data in one place, normalizing it, and acting on it. If you were lucky, you knew there was a problem at the same time your customer did. If you were very lucky, you knew before they did. And if you were extremely lucky, you informed them before they even noticed an issue. Just reaching this scenario took significant investment, both money and time. Taking the next leap to data analytics and correlation, let alone AI and ML, was a whole other investment conversation and justification.
The Intelligent Advantage: Hive Fabric’s Message Bus for MSPs
This is where the Message Bus in Hive Fabric comes into play. Our Message Bus reads and provides access to all actions and related data. This occurs within the Fabric. It spans from the hardware foundation, through the hypervisor, and all the way up to the applications inside the VMs you’re running. All this data is in one place, normalized, instantly consumable, and AI-ready. This empowers Hive Fabric for MSPs with unparalleled insights.
A Hyperconverged Fabric solution that provides VSI, VDI, and shared storage in a single bare metal deployment? One that can be supported by a single team of generalists? And, the platform is AI and ML ready? Now that’s a solution I would have eagerly embraced.If you would like to find out more about Hive Fabric for MSPs, why not request a demo.