ClubDrive: A New Twist on Virtualization

Last week I spoke about the Citrix app for the iPad, and briskly noted that ClubDrive was the company behind my virtualized experience. Today, I’m blogging about ClubDrive specifically. In case you didn’t know, they specialize in platform agnostic application virtuliazation and hosted IT. I got to chat with ClubDrive Executive VP Byron Attridge about what the company does and some VAR opportunities. Here’s a recap.

In case you weren’t sure what exactly ClubDrive was virtualizing, Attridge gave me a nice little run down:

Since Citrix is the backbone of ClubDrive’s company, you might be asking yourself what makes ClubDrive’s solution uniquet? Why not just virtualize stuff yourself or do your own cloud? The obvious culprits (time and money) arise, but even if you implement it, you may still lack some solid experience with managing all those virtual apps.

Attridge explains:

And followed up quickly with…

Since ClubDrive happily virtualizes clients, server applications and database servers, it’s not hard to believe. And since ClubDrive lets all three of these ‘live’ on the same physical hardware, performance allegedly jumps through the roof. Latency is nearly non-existent, the company claims.

First Steps

So then why not just jump on board with ClubDrive? There’s always hesitation in such a big move, but Attridge explained that a lot of customers end up going totally virtual with ClubDrive after ClubDrive comes in and just virtualizes their backup storage. When a server goes down, and a flick of a switch to moves data requests to ClubDrive’s backup servers, customers feel like they’d rather just keep up with payments than start overhauling failed server hardware and dealing with down-time.

Partner Program

He stressed that the SMB is the area that tends to love this stuff, but the Enterprise is always wary of any solution that sees IT not as a part of an infrastructure but a simple utility. But that’s where VARs working with SMBs can come in.

Attridge explain about their partner program…

Currently, ClubDrive has only 5 partners on board.

Partners have a bunch of opportunities if they chose to work with ClubDrive. The company offers 2% on annualized revenue on a monthly basis, and revenues are stackable.

ClubDrive has a StoreGrid partnership in place, and the companyleverages redundant data centers in Atlanta and Austin. As far as privacy goes, ClubDrive cut its teeth in the banking business, and because of that, they carry their legacy of secure data with 256 bit encrypted backups to ensure there’s no data leakage.

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