The Virtunet Difference
Zensar’s business is about providing post warranty support services for older storage arrays. So, it is in Zensar’s interest to have their customers keep using their older arrays for a long time and not upgrade to newer faster arrays. VirtuCache helps in this endeavor by postponing a storage upgrade for storage performance reasons, since VirtuCache improves the performance of any storage array however old or slow.Massachusetts, USA; December 12, 2021.
Zensar is a publicly listed company with annual revenues of $500M. They are in the outsourced IT infrastructure and software services space. One of their business units offers post warranty support services for storage arrays, and this division rebrands and resells VirtuCache to enterprise customers of their storage support services.
3rd party storage support services businesses (also referred to as storage break-fix services or post warranty support services) offer break-fix and other support services for storage arrays. Such service providers are especially competitive versus the storage OEM, when the storage array is past its warranty period, and as a result getting support from the OEM becomes very expensive (since the OEM is incentivized to upsell the customer with a newer array instead of maintaining the older one). Now the 3rd party support services vendors are incentivized in exactly the opposite way, they would like their customers to keep using their older array for longer (since 3rd party storage support services vendors lose the customer when that customer upgrades to a newer array). So, it is in the interest of the post warranty support services vendor to keep their customer on an older array for as long as possible.
There are three factors that cause the customer to upgrade their array. (1) The array is past it’s 3-year support period from the OEM, and hence out of support. (2) The customer needs more capacity. (3) The customer needs improved storage performance. The 3rd party storage support services vendor is successfully able to block a storage array upgrade for the first two reasons – by providing break-fix support and by replacing the customer’s smaller capacity drives by newer larger capacity ones. However, they are not able to block an array upgrade for performance reasons, and this is where we step in. By caching all reads and writes from/to any SAN based storage appliance, VirtuCache improves the performance of any SAN based storage array, and as a result, VirtuCache is able to postpone a SAN upgrade that the customer might have been contemplating for the purposes improving storage performance.
Zensar has partnered with Virtunet Systems since 2015. Their arrangement with Virtunet allows them to rebrand VirtuCache and resell it to customers of their storage support services. Zensar calls the rebranded version of VirtuCache, I2Xeleration software and they have been reselling I2xeleration to their customer base of older storage arrays, primary Dell Equallogic, Dell Compellent, EMC VNX, EMC Clariion, EMC VMAX, HP StoreVirtual, HP LeftHand Networks, and IBM DS series arrays.
If you are a Zensar customer, please review this press release, about how to get access to VirtuCache through Zensar.