Artisan Infrastructure offers wholesale only storage as a service

Artisan Infrastructure stopped by to introduce me to their wholesale Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) capability that is part of their virtual Private Data Center (vPDC) platform (Cornerstone™). Cornerstone, according to Artisan Infrastructure, is designed to address the needs of service providers. Their goal is providing a reliable, secure, but low cost platform for others' service offerings.

What Artisan Infrastructure has to say

The Artisan Infrastructure Object Based Cloud Storage option for service providers meets this challenge with the following advantages:

• Cost-Competitive: Artisan Infrastructure provides the industry’s lowest cost option with pricing that is 70% below is Amazon Web Services (AWS) at only $.029/GB.
• 100% Wholesale Only: Artisan Infrastructure maintains a 100% wholesale only business model and enables Telcos, MSPs, CSPs and IT service providers to deliver cloud-based storage solutions. This focus guarantees the complete absence of conflict in the channel.
• Complete Control: The Artisan Infrastructure Object Based Cloud Storage offering provides service providers with complete control, autonomy and security when building independent cloud storage service offerings.
• Broadest Range of Cloud Storage Options: Service providers leveraging the object-based cloud storage platform gain access to a large and growing portfolio of templates from technology providers that include Anchor, TwinStrata, Maldivica, Mezeo, Vembu, Ctera and PHDvirtual.

Artisan Infrastructure’s wholesale only IaaS business supports hundreds of MSP’s, Telcos, data center operators, and ISVs to create profitable cloud practices by establishing Artisan Infrastructure’s vPDC as their own cloud infrastructure while maintaining full control of their customer base and service offerings. The Object Based Cloud Storage offering is the most recent platform available to Certified Solution Ecosystem partners. Artisan Infrastructure is also building strategic relationships with hardware and software vendors to establish Cornerstone as the foundation for their cloud storage solutions.

Snapshot analysis

Suppliers of cloud services, like end user organizations, are looking for ways to both reduce costs and simplify their lives. They need a set of resources that are extremely reliable, easy to manage, easy to deploy in order to deploy their own service offering. They face a difficult challenge - should they build their own infrastructure or reach out to a partner. Artisan belives that providing outsourced services to the outsourcers themselves is a market niche that no one is currently addressing.

Service providers, Artisan believes, would be interested in a platform for their product or service that is designed to make it easy for them to develop and deploy their product or service and make it possible to let someone else deal with other suppliers such as VMware, NetApp, HP, Arista, Brocade, and Cisco on their behalf. The fact that this service might be less costly than something they built themselves would be a wonderful benefit.

Artisan Infrastructure believes that it is the first to offer such a platform for service providers. I'll be watching to see how well their concept is accepted by the market.