Storage means saving data for later use. Today, we use types like DAS, NAS, SAN, and cloud.

DAS connects directly to your computer. It’s good for one user but not easy to share.

NAS connects to a network. Many users can access it. It’s great for home or small office use.

SAN is used by big companies. It’s fast but costly and hard to manage.

Cloud storage saves your data online. You can access it from anywhere. It’s flexible but depends on internet and has some privacy concerns.

For small use, NAS or cloud is best. For big data, SAN works better. DAS is fine for simple needs. Choose what fits your use and budget.

Given how bad VMware is at managing VMware's own hypervisor, using something from them to manage other people's stuff seems... insane.

@dashrender said in Where are MSP managed on-prem workloads moving?:

@pete-s said in Where are MSP managed on-prem workloads moving?:

Thanks, it does makes sense to move to SaaS solutions for a single customer that is doing their own IT.

But a MSP is in a different position because they, besides know-how, have a larger scale. So it can make economic sense to host things for their customers that doesn't make sense for each individual customer.

For instance does it makes sense for a company to have a server to host their website on? No, it doesn't. But if you're an MSP and your customers have a thousand websites that needs to live somewhere, it might make sense for you to host them.

I guess it also depends if you're an MSP that just manages things or if you also have your own hosting/cloud infrastructure or use another provider for that.

All good points. I have no view into that world, the few ITSPs I know are using other companies solutions, not rolling their own, or even hosting their own. Though some of them, we'll take JB for example, do manage all the stuffs other than hypervisor and hardware for things like a Ubiquiti controller, and PBXs.

If you really do have need to host 1000's of websites (or really massive sites, it could make sense to manage the whole stack, but then again, it could be better to get services from someone like Vultr, or in extreme cases like Amazon/Azure.

It's possible that ITSP/MSPs in the SMB space in general don't own any infrastructure themselves.

I know large companies that fully outsource their workloads to service providers. Those service providers host the workloads primarily in their own datacenters but also on public cloud infrastructure. But these service providers are often large companies themselves so they have scale.