Customers love all the choices of public cloud computing, but hate having to sort through, combine, and implement them for specific business goals. This has refreshed market opportunities for managed service providers. Some now help businesses understand and implement public cloud solutions, as well as provide their own unique services. They have to cover more ground to enable diverse applications to run in a number of different environments. This can make it challenging to pick the right infrastructure, like storage, for their data centers.

Far from decimating its business, public cloud adoption helped drive the expansion of Thrive Operations LLC. Over the last few years, the MSP has been helping customers navigate all of the choices in public cloud.

“Those services are not easy to roll out,” said Michael Gray (pictured), chief technology officer at Thrive. “You still need someone to understand what the business needs are and then translate those into technology solutions.”

Gray spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Boston, Massachusetts. They discussed Thrive’s pivot in recent years and the infrastructure it uses to meet customers’ diverse needs (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Storage for workloads in high, low and mid-range places

Thrive now offers a variety of solutions for companies straddling public and private infrastructure. It endorses public cloud when appropriate. “We’re an application-enablement company. So if your application is best run in [Azure Cloud], then we want to put it there,” Gray said.

On the other hand, Thrive and its customers often find that private cloud fits the bill for certain workloads. “We’re running into a lot of public-cloud refugees. They didn’t realize a lot of the maybe incidental fees along the way actually climbed up to be a fairly big budget number,” Gray stated.

Thrive also runs eight data centers of its own. It can provide many of the solutions public-cloud providers offer at a much higher performance level, according to Gray.

Thrive has expanded by acquiring a number of other MSPs over the past few years. This resulted in a lot of disparate storage systems crowding its inventory. The company wanted to standardize on one storage platform. However, finding one flexible enough to meet its increasingly diverse needs was a challenge. It also needed high performance for very complex, data-hungry workloads.

The company opted for Infinidat Inc. storage for its flexible, cover-all range of capacity and performance. It combines flash, [dynamic random-access memory], and high-capacity hard drives to match all kinds of workloads and keep costs reasonable.

“You have to sacrifice at least one floor tile for Infinidat. It’s very off-putting at first,” Gray said. However, the loss of space is worth the gain in capabilities, he added. It now runs Infinidat in all of its data centers. Some of the benefits include almost endless capacity and elasticity. This means there are no more customers calling complaining about slow storage. In fact, Thrive has eliminated all storage help-desk issues.

Thrive moved to Infinidat for operational efficiency but realized it’s also a platform on which it can build innovative services. For example, it now provides high-performance storage replication similar to what’s available in public cloud.

Gray is currently watching Infinidat’s Neutrix Cloud offering, which enables the platform to interact with public clouds. “Cloud interaction is something that is desperately needed in the storage space. So I’m interested to see how that product grows,” he said. 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Infinidat Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Infinidat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE