MSP News

MSPAlliance Executive Spotlight: Kelly Murphy, CEO of Gridstore

By MSP Alliance Blogs

The world of managed services and cloud computing is changing on an almost daily basis. Perhaps no service vertical is as important to the managed services and cloud community as storage. I recently had the opportunity to chat with Kelly Murphy, Founder and CEO of Gridstore, to get his views on the managed storage landscape and how the MSPs are doing in his own community of partners. 

(Charles Weaver, CEO of MSPAlliance) CW: Kelly, thank you for taking the time to speak with MSPNews. First, congratulations on Gridstore becoming an MSPAlliance Accredited Vendor. Why don't you give our readers a little background on Gridstore. 

(Kelly Murphy, CEO of Gridstore) KM:  Thanks , Charles for the introduction.  Yes, we are pleased to be part of MSPAlliance and providing leading edge storage solutions to the MSP community.  Before we discuss how our products and programs add value to the MSP community, I'd like to provide you with some insight into our company.  Gridstore was founded in 2007 and our initial objective or vision was to make enterprise class storage simple and affordable to any size customer.  

Prior to founding Gridstore, in 1998 I founded one of the first software-as-a-service companies.  We delivered on-demand procurement and supply chain management to some of the largest retailers in the world and their trading partners.  By 2006, our storage costs from our data center provider grew from a small amount to over $25,000 a month on storage.  When we sold that business in late 2006, that number was stuck in my head and I kept asking the question - if storage is a commodity, then why does it cost so much - why is it the most expensive component of the IT stack.  Gridstore is the answer to that question.

The innovation behind Gridstore is a unique combination of virtualization with a grid processing architecture that delivers performance, scalability and reliability that goes beyond enterprise class storage - while using simple building blocks of storage to eliminate cost and complexity.  The result is reduced storage costs by a factor of 10X when compared to enterprise storage while offering the performance, and scalability of enterprise class storage and reliability that goes beyond RAID 6.  This simple building block approach to storage allows customers to start small and incrementally add blocks of storage that grow capacity, and reliability simply by attaching a storage node to your network.   You get the simplicity and affordability of small standalone NAS devices, with performance, scaling and reliability that goes beyond enterprise class storage.  

My experience running an on-demand software company naturally led me to look at other types of service provider businesses to see if similar problems existed.  When we studied the MSP community - we found some similar but worse problems arising from the cost of storage - and ones that we could see no viable way to address - regardless of the cost.  From this point on, we have been zeroed in on the MSP problems.  

CW:  So Kelly, what you're saying is that you had the MSP community in mind from the start?

KM:  Yes, Charles that's correct.  We spent a significant amount of time talking with MSPs to understand their business and the challenges they face and since late 2009 we have been working our product through various stages of development with a number of MSPs.

CW:  So what were your findings?

KM:  We found two key issues with MSPs 

1) The cost of reliable, scalable storage is hurting the profitability of DR services and the ability to innovate with new cloud services. 

2) SMBs use of standalone NAS devices increases risk for customers and eats into MSP profitability.

CW:  I am sure that if there is a way to reduce the cost of provisioning DR and cloud services, MSPs will be interested to know more.  Can you give us some examples of how your MSP partners are using Gridstore for cloud- based services?

KM:  Sure. The first is pretty self explanatory - the cost of reliable, scalable shared storage for cloud based DR directly impacts the profitability of these services.  DR is in effect an insurance policy.  The problem is that you are moving data from a low cost storage platform in an SMB to one in the cloud that can cost 10-20X the cost because it is running in a data center with high energy and cooling cost and the storage must be scalable, high performance and fault tolerant.   Any opportunity to lower the capital and operating costs of storage has a direct impact on the bottom line for these services.

We have seen a couple of key areas that MSPs have focused on.  The first is using Gridstore as the storage platform for DR Services.  MSPs already have software such as Asigra and others to manage the DR process - Gridstore provides MSPs a low cost, scalable and reliable storage platform on which they can incrementally grow these services by adding low cost storage nodes as required.  Gridstore is multi-tenant and provides the management information to determine capacity used on a daily basis by each customer.  MSPs have the benefit of managing a single storage pool that can start small and grow at a low price point as their services grow.  This maps directly to what is required for MSPs to scale their services cost effectively.

The second area we have seen deployments with is for Cloud Based Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.  In the case, Gridstore is providing a multi-tenant storage platform that provides the primary storage to the end customers using the VDI service.  The benefit here is very clear - these are relatively new service offerings from MSPs - Gridstore allows them to start small and incrementally grow as customer demand grows - they do not need to bet the farm on these new service offerings. 

CW:  That sounds very interesting for an MSP.  It gives them the flexibility to bring new service to market without large upfront investments, yet allows them to scale in a coherent way which is vital to MSP profitability.  

Going back to the second area you identified, can you give us some examples of how SMB storage impacts MSPs and what Gridstore does to address this problem?

KM: The exploding rate of storage consumption has driven SMBs to add low cost standalone storage devices, one after another, to meet their data demands.  At the same time, a recent study showed that 83% of SMBs rank reliability as their top buying criteria for storage, and number 2 at 60% was cost.  Getting reliability for the lowest cost is a tough circle to square. 

SMBs understand that they run their business 24/7 and that if their storage stops - their business stops - which is why for 83% of SMBs, reliability is their top buying priority - but they do not have the budget to address it.  So they continue adding standalone NAS devices which multiply cost, complexity and single points of failure.  

CW:  What types of issues does SMB storage sprawl create for MSPs?

KM: Well, multiply SMB storage sprawl by 50-75 or a 100 and that is what the MSP is trying to manage - literally hundreds of flavors of storage with hundreds of single points of failure and management complexity that eats into the MSP profitability. 

For an MSP today - Adding storage capacity means going onsite, taking down a server and putting in a disk -- disrupting the customers operations and a costly truck roll for the MSP that eats profitability.  If a server fails for any reason such as a disk, network card, power supply, storage controller, software - the emergency response team kicks into gear - major disruption to the customers business and major utilization of the MSPs resources result in a big hit to profitability and service levels.  

Customers want the reliability that enables them to run 24/7 without disruption.  This is the offer that MSPs make to their customers.  Yet the most important component in the IT stack they run on is standalone storage - a single point of failure.   Until Gridstore made it economical for an SMB to purchase a scale-out storage platform, there was really no viable way for MSPs to offer this level of reliability and service to their customers.  

Working on this with MSPs, we coined the term Managed Storage to wrap up this new service offering.  Managed Storage allows an MSP to offer low cost storage capacity that is highly reliable and simple to manage. This aligns the interests of both the MSP and their customer and provides a platform on which a customer can grow and the MSP can build a profitable high quality service.  It's a very unique and innovative solution. 

CW: Tell me a little bit about how Managed Storage works.

KM: We were aware that support was a big issue for the MSP community and can rapidly eat into their profits.  A gridstore can be configured to monitor thresholds and alerts that can be issued to central RMM monitors via SNMP or WMI events.  

Now if there is a storage node failure - the customer does not even know it occurred.  The MSP will receive an alert and with three clicks, the MSP can remotely allocate the spare node to take over where the last one failed.  A new node can be sent out and auto-connected to the network ready for the MSP.  There are no emergency truck rolls and the customer runs nonstop.  

CW:  Yes, that's a very easy solution to the support problem.  I'm curious how you handle a customer's additional capacity requirements.

KM: That's very easy as well.  To add capacity, all an MSP needs to do is simply attach a Gridstore storage node to the customers' network and the storage pool is increased.  MSPs can leave an additional low cost storage node on the network and remotely allocate that to a pool when required.  A new node can then be sent out and simply connected to the network, where it shows up on the Gridstore management console ready for the MSPs future use.

With Managed Storage - MSPs can offer a level of service and reliability that was never before possible, and in doing so, increase their own profitability.

CW:  Well, this sounds like a very innovative product but what is total addressable market for this solution and what are the business benefits for the MSP?

KM:  Increased Profitability - The economics for an MSP to resell Gridstore offer returns of 3-4 times over adding another file server when a customer needs additional capacity. The superior economics of selling Gridstore and eliminating the operating cost and risk of storage silos results in significantly higher profitability for the MSP.   IDC predicts that the SMB market will grow to around a $6B market by 2014 (of the total storage market of $30B) - so there's a significant amount of business to go after.  

CW:  Are there any online resources you can point our readers to -- things that would be useful in their future understanding of Gridstore?

KW:  MSPs can download our MSP Fact Sheet on our website at www.gridstore.com to learn more.

CW:  It looks like Gridstore's "managed storage" solution is well-suited to our MSP community.  If our association members are interested in finding out more about the Gridstore product, who should they get in touch with?

KM:  They can either email me at kmurphy@gridstore.com or call us at 650.681.9768.

CW:  Kelly, thanks for your time today and welcome to MSPAlliance.