Dave Cahill wrote an excellent post on Wikibon today about gateway storage and how these providers may become the next generation storage systems.

Cahill writes that historically a wave of disruption is flattened as the entrenched legacy providers build features that essentially provides what the new players were hoping would be their way to stake a claim in the market. These new gateway providers include These companies include CTERA, Nasuni, Nirvanix, Panzura, StorSimple and TwinStrata.

Traditional solutions providers have prospered by integrating big box storage systems for enterprise customers. But the cloud is different and value added resellers and systems integrators have struggled to make the jump, as Cahill explains, from “box pushers” to services provider.

Gateway storage may prove to be the way that they make the move.

What Cahill outlines is intriguing. He asks if gateway storage systems might be comparable to the role that mobile devices have played in disrupting the PC market. He writes:

Amazon Web Services VP & Distinguished Engineer, James Hamilton, in a great presentation on Internet Scale Storage given at SIGMOD 2011, points to mobile phone design as the best leading indicator for future data center innovation. Mobile phones are thin, yet converged, feature-rich, devices that function as a presentation layer for a bunch of applications that are served up from some sort of cloud. These initial cloud gateways are essentially converged storage appliances serving as a presentation layer to data that resides in the cloud. Certain applications still reside locally, but as the cost of flash continues to decline, the onsite cache will become larger and cheaper on a cost/GB basis.

If this mobile phone analogy has any merit, doesn’t this also mean that the more lucrative long-term model for the cloud gateway opportunity is providing an ongoing subscription-based storage service? I have to believe that a lot of people would be interested in owning this type of annuity stream.

Services Angle

That’s intriguing. What might this do for VARs is provide a way to become services providers that use the gateway storage systems to sell subscription services.

If the cloud storage gateway can accelerate the evolution of the VAR business model from box pusher to service provider, then this gateway concept becomes that much more powerful. Simultaneously enabling customers and arming the channel with a cloud story is a very interesting proposition. Established vendors have all sorts of business model and organizational inertia that make it difficult to tell a story like this.

The catch? Established VARs are not going to make any kind of switch until they see this model can provide them with some return. So, in many ways it’s up to the vendor.

Who’s going to step up to the plate?