ioFABRIC launches Software-Defined Storage educational program for partners

Toronto software-defined storage (SDS) company ioFabric Inc. has unveiled an online educational tool called LEad (Learn Explore and Deploy), the program materials for which can be self-branded and which is aimed at helping channel partners enhance SDS sales activities.
As the need for simplifying data storage systems becomes greater, the need also increases for education, not only to tell people the what and the why of the technology they’re using, but also as a sales tool for convincing already stretched IT departments of the need for data migration and the benefits of investing in a distributed, enterprise-class storage system.
“We know our channel partners want to start selling right away and our new LEaD Program provides the tools they need to educate their customers about how software-defined storage can help them,” said ioFABRIC Vice President of Business Development Nigel Miller. “We have created an online environment where our partners can engage customers, showing them how Vicinity handles the most common challenges in their environments. We have made it painless for our partners to start selling with us because we have everything they need to fulfill demand today.”
The LEaD program demonstrates to channel partners and clients how to get more life out of existing storage systems, migrate data cost-effectively with a minimum of risk, and enable custom workloads like high-priority Docker apps, whether deployed as a turnkey hyperconverged appliance or on commodity hardware for a storage platform.
“We know IT experts do their own research and often have their buy decisions made before they contact a vendor,” said Miller. “LEaD is providing educational tools to these experts, providing information to help with making that decision.”
The LEaD program educates prospective clients about the software-defined storage industry, offering them a glimpse of how ioFabric’s Vicinity product keeps moves data closer to the workload depending on relevance, and shows them how to deploy the platform in a real-world setting once they’re comfortable with how the software works handling network latency and other challenges such as device failures.
Last August, ioFabric won the Most Innovative Enterprise Business Application award at the annual Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, California for its Vicinity product, a flash-optimized, SDS (software-defined storage) solution that IT professionals and other users can deploy to reduce costs and technical frustrations associated with data storage.
Their Vicinity Quality-of-Service driven automation platform, which can be licensed or white-labelled with additional hardware and/or software through ioFabric’s channel partners, uses existing systems and media to get extra life out of existing storage while scaling performance and capacity.
Vicinity’s SDS 2.0 approach automates processes that previously soaked up a lot of time and energy on the part of a company’s IT department.
By automatically maintaining storage infrastructure, Vicinity improves efficiencies in storage architecture by prioritizing data according to how frequently it’s accessed without the need for data migration or changes to existing applications.
“LEaD gives me what I have been looking for. It’s the first time a vendor has provided the exact sales tools I need to get started out of the gate,” said Frank Kuschmierz, CEO of Xenium IT Corp., a premium provider of IT services focusing on setup and support of networking infrastructure including storage systems. “This is setting a new standard for software vendors. All I have to do is take a customer through the LEaD program and they will see and understand how Vicinity works. ioFABRIC has set up a series of demos and software downloads that won’t waste a customer’s time. I see real benefit in this.”
Last July, ioFabric emerged from a two-year stealth mode period and announced a round of seed fundraising led by Real Ventures and private investors.