Toshiba to enhance SI, VAR and VAD channel awareness with ‘Build your own Data Centre’ initiative

‘Build your own Data Centre’ highlights the advantages of building Private Cloud storage & Business Critical Enterprise Server & Storage Systems using Toshiba’s MG Enterprise class high-capacity hard drives

Toshiba has rolled out its ambitious ‘Build your own Data Centre’ initiative that intends to educate the channel including System Integrators, VARs and VAD in helping their enterprise customers ramp up their Business critical Enterprise Server Storage Systems , Cloud Storage , Industrial Server and Storage systems  with high-capacity hard drives and meet their growing Data Centre storage requirements.

The first of the awareness and training events was recently unveiled in the UAE and more events are to follow across Saudi Arabia, South Africa and other key Middle East and Africa markets. The events will help enhance the awareness of both sales and pre-sales teams belonging to system integrators about the building blocks of enterprise level storage, especially with respect to high capacity and purpose-built storage hard drives. Toshiba believes that a more aware channel will be capable to address market requirements more specifically for use cases such as surveillance or back up or for Big Data storage and more by recommending the right fit solutions.

As part of the current initiative, Toshiba intends to reach out to as many SIs and storage resellers across the target markets, making them understand what enterprise storage is about, making them aware of different kinds of storage frameworks such as RAID or NAS for instance in more detail.

Santosh Varghese, VP at Toshiba Gulf FZE said “We want the data storage channel ecosystem to be aware about the kinds of storage backup companies need. We see many companies even now using Tape as a storage backup option, but a hard drive is the first choice for storage, because the cost per GB is still very low compared to SSDs that are used in the large server farms of Facebook, Google etc. As of 2021, 63% of data storage is still on HDD and by 2025 58% of data storage will happen on HDD.”

By the year 2025, 58% of data storage is expected to on hard drives with SSDs accounting for 16% of data storage and NAND making up 10% of the storage. By the year 2030, the hard drives will still account for the majority share of data storage at 48% with SSDs expected to grow to 29% and NAND to 12% of the total data storage.

With 166 Zettabytes of Data forecast to be produced by 2025, the storage market will continue to see steep growth that needs to be addressed. Toshiba in 2018 launched the industry first Helium 14TB enterprise Server HDD and continues to launch advanced, new generation -technologies to bring larger storage capacity drives to meet the growing Data Centre needs. Toshiba expects to bring to market 40+TB enterprise hard drives by 2026.

Santosh add, “The training programs we have rolled out are good opportunities for technical sales people from the system integrators to come and learn about the opportunities and the technologies and how to integrate the high capacity drives into the barebone enclosures etc as well as how to scale up. The whole program is themed ‘Build your own Data Centre’.”

The ‘Build your own Data Centre’ initiative follows an earlier successful initiative by Toshiba to educate the market about the need to use robust hard drives specifically built to weather tough outdoor conditions as well as be able to run 24/7 without downtime for surveillance use cases. This initiative saw Toshiba make rapid strides in taking a significant market lead in the surveillance storage segment within 6 months after launch in Saudi Arabia.

Santosh said, “The market has matured quite a bit in the past couple of years in terms of their appreciation of the need to invest in the right kind of storage. During the peak of COVID, where people started working from homes on remote basis, many businesses were caught unaware from a storage point of view as they did not have the necessary cloud storage infrastructure. The challenges they faced has forced many Businesses including Banks and other large enterprises as well as SMBs to rethink their strategies. That taught many businesses to accelerate their investments in cloud including cloud storage, while earlier they may have only paid lip service to the idea of the cloud. We have witnessed demand growth for high- capacity storage in hybrid cloud investments and want to ensure our channel is ready to address that requirement.”

Santosh also elaborates that the cost savings are substantial when you opt for solutions including NAS and JBOD based storage in private cloud investments as it provides them the opportunity to choose and scale up capacities as needed at any point. Toshiba also has partnered with NAS barebone suppliers to offer greater value propositions to Businesses looking for enterprise grade cost effective storage options but the challenge was to ensure that the channel is ready to educate the market about how they can avail cost savings by getting to build their own storage instead of buying off the shelf.

“We have partnered with leading vendors who provide JBOD enclosures. However, we then found the market lacking awareness around that because they were not able to make headway in convincing CIOs and IT managers as to why they need to opt for these solutions. It is a fact that if they buy these enclosures and populate them with enterprise hardware from, vendors like, for example, Toshiba, there’s almost 30% saving vis a vis buying off the shelf options. This also offers high scalability and the TCO is much lower. We therefore embarked on the idea of reaching out to channel partners and educating them about this invaluable proposition so that they in turn can reach out to their customers with a more convincing go to market approach.”

Toshiba’s high-capacity enterprise drives under the MG series provide the most reliable storage solutions for enterprises. The MG Series offers formatted capacities as high as 18 TB with interface options including SATA and SAS and delivers 24/7 operation at a workload of 550 TB/year. Further, a 20 TB drive is part of the roadmap. The MG Series is ideal for enterprise storage array and industrial server and storage systems and provides the capacity and advanced technologies to meet the special demands of datacentre and cloud-scale infrastructures.