With the AI boom, enterprise storage, which had sat quietly in the background of infrastructure development, became the central piece of innovation. 2026 marked a decisive shift as AI moved from simple experimentation to critical, full-scale business use. This created the need for massive, high-speed storage solutions capable of handling the bandwidth of generated and stored data to run AI applications efficiently.
For channel partners, this is an opportunity to go beyond simply recommending storage based on price and to understand their customers' needs, market conditions, and what businesses are looking for in a storage solution — scalable, reliable, and a balance of high performance for today and their future business.
Why Storage Performance Matters More Than Ever
Storage performance will likely become a significant differentiator in the future. This is because users expect apps to be fast and responsive. Users will continue to access cloud-based applications, databases, shared files, analytics platforms, and collaboration tools in their day-to-day activities. Businesses are using AI to analyze large amounts of data to generate business insights.
This makes storage performance closely connected to the overall user and application experience.
Faster storage reduces latency, improves data accessibility, increases application response time, and enables demanding workloads to run more efficiently. Therefore, improved databases, virtualized environments, analytics platforms, and AI workloads will directly improve productivity and infrastructure efficiency for those organizations.
For partners, the message is clear: storage is moving from a supporting component to a more strategic part of infrastructure planning.
AI Effect: Storage Is Becoming Critical Infrastructure
AI is one of the biggest forces driving changes in storage requirements.
AI Workloads require the ability to process very large volumes of data, and the rate at which data can be provided to compute resources impacts overall system performance. Additionally, as organizations move from experimenting with AI to deploying production-level AI workloads, the amount of data flowing through storage systems will increase dramatically. Therefore, storage systems must now support increasingly complex and demanding data pipes and inference workloads.
Therefore, customers interested in purchasing AI infrastructure will need to evaluate storage alongside servers and accelerators when selecting hardware.
Choosing Right Storage Architecture
There isn't one single storage architecture that works best for every customer.
This is why partners should avoid positioning storage as a simple "faster is better" decision.
How Partners Can Recommend Storage More Effectively
The strongest recommendations for storage start with the customer's workload.
Partners should ask:
- What applications are running on the customer's infrastructure?
- How much data is currently being generated?
- How quickly is the data growing?
- Which workloads are performance-sensitive?
- Is the customer running virtual machines or databases?
- Are AI or analytics workloads being introduced?
- What are the customer's backup and recovery requirements?
- What storage capacity will be required over the next three to five years?
Asking these questions will help partners understand whether their customers are looking for high-capacity or resilient storage solutions or a combination of these. This helps them position better in offering the right kind of storage solutions.
Opportunity for Partners
Storage refreshes can also create opportunities beyond the storage system itself.
A customer upgrading storage may also require:
- Server upgrades
- Additional memory
- Networking upgrades
- Backup and recovery solutions
- Data protection
- Infrastructure management
- Expansion capacity
This creates an opportunity for partners to approach storage as part of a broader infrastructure solution rather than as an isolated product sale.
Redington Online's portfolio reflects this broader opportunity, with enterprise storage products and components available from vendors such as Dell, HPE and Lenovo.
This allows partners to build recommendations based on the customer's environment and workload, rather than limiting the conversation to a single storage device.
Preparing Customers for Next-Generation Workloads
Storage requirements will continue to evolve as businesses adopt AI agents, analytics, automation, and increasingly data-intensive applications.
Partners can help customers prepare by evaluating current storage performance, identifying bottlenecks, understanding future workloads, and planning upgrades before existing infrastructure becomes a constraint.
The goal should be to create a storage environment that scales with the business rather than requiring reactive upgrades whenever a new workload emerges.
The role of storage in business infrastructure is changing. Data growth, AI adoption, virtualization, analytics, and increasingly demanding applications are making storage performance an important consideration alongside compute, networking, and security.
For partners, this creates an opportunity to have more strategic conversations with customers. Instead of asking only how much storage they need, partners can ask what workloads they are running, how quickly their data is growing, and what performance their business applications require.
Explore enterprise storage solutions on Redington Online and help your customers build infrastructure ready for today's workloads and tomorrow's data demands.
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