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The MinIO Partner Program: Building an AI Data Storage Ecosystem Together

Mike Marinchak Mike Marinchak on Partners |
The MinIO Partner Program: Building an AI Data Storage Ecosystem Together
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While still in its infancy, it’s no secret that enterprise AI adoption is shaking up the entire technology landscape. 

Five years ago, CIOs were under immense pressure to figure out their cloud strategy and the answer was, put simply, migrate everything to the public cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP). Now, CIOs are under even more pressure to figure out their AI strategy and the mandate is changing drastically. 

Let’s start with the numbers. According to Statista, the total amount of data created, captured, copied, and consumed globally is forecast to reach 394 zettabytes by 2028. This is a rapid increase from 149 zettabytes in 2024, which can largely be attributed to AI model scale growth as training compute is doubling every five months and dataset sizes every eight, according to Stanford University’s 2025 AI Index Report.

The success of the public cloud is built on elasticity, services, and convenience—infrastructure available immediately, at exactly the scale needed by the business. It was not, however, built on economics and control. Considering the figures above, this poses a problem in the AI era for two main reasons:

  1. Because the economics of data have changed: data storage requirements for AI are reaching exascale and there is no model that supports keeping that data in the public cloud with its data access and egress fees (at the scale of 100s of petabytes or an exabyte or two, the overall cost would be in the 10’s to 100’s of millions dollars per year depending on capacity, tiering, and data access profiles). Everything you do in the public cloud, you can do in private cloud/on-prem, but at a savings of 60%-70%.
  2. Because data is the only moat in the AI arms race: the importance of AI to organizations is existential, and therefore it is essential that they have control over their data, over their learning, over their models. AI is powered by data and CIOs are quickly realizing if they don’t have end to end control of their data, then they are putting themselves at a disadvantage, both economically and competitively.

This is driving a massive shift in the market as organizations rethink how they are storing their data. 

All of the major AI models—from OpenAI’s ChatGPT to Anthropic’s Claude—are built on object storage. High-time enterprises are following suit. The day has come where we say goodbye to navigating a medley of legacy offerings and file & object gateway storage that can’t scale beyond 20 petabytes, struggles with multi-modal data, and quickly becomes cost prohibitive. And hello to a single, centralized, and unified namespace that can scale with the world's most data-intensive workloads at a fraction of the cost and total control. 

MinIO AIStor was built for this shift and we’re thrilled to extend its power to our partner ecosystem in more significant ways with the MinIO Partner Program. 

MinIO spent the last year cultivating a very robust channel partnership network, knowing that this day would come. The software-defined, AI data storage partner opportunity is greenfield and we’re ready to capitalize on it and help our partners capitalize as well.

As the former channel and partner sales lead at NetApp and Pure Storage, I'm thrilled to bring my experience to MinIO in order to lead our channel efforts. Bringing nearly 25 years of experience in the data storage and infrastructure industry, I'll be focused on extending MinIO AIStor’s capabilities and services through channel partners (system integrators, appliance partners and distributors), with plans to partner globally. This new program will be critical to company growth moving forward.

The new and expanded MinIO Partner Program caters to customer and partner demand for object storage at AI scale. It offers an evolved experience, introducing new, unique and profitable opportunities for partners as AI adoption spurs dramatic changes in the modern tech stack. More and more customers require object-native storage systems for AI and MinIO AIStor is emerging as the de facto.

With a customer-centric approach and partner-first mentality, the MinIO Partner Program centers around four key pillars:

  • Global Reach — MinIO’s massive global adoption (over 33K community Slack members and 52.8K stars and 6K forks on GitHub) and AIStor’s unmatched performance, which scales linearly with capacity in a single namespace, as customers strive for storage environment modernization and cost and control optimization.
  • Bundling Opportunity — a 4-5x selling opportunity by bundling standardized storage hardware with MinIO AIStor and services to maximize ASPs. 
  • Sustained Profitability & Predictable Subscription Model — recurring revenue with generous margins for the entirety of the customer engagement, across renewals, up-sell and cross-sell. 
  • First-Class Enablement & Certification — dedicated deal support, enablement training and a paid certification program via the MinIO Academy to provide the skills, knowledge, and confidence required for success. 

The new program also introduces the Elite Partner Tier, which includes MOUs, entity-based contracts, and incentives for goal attainment across new account acquisition, number of certifications, and more. 

Our goal is to build the gold standard of global partner ecosystems in order to give customers the choice they deserve, freeing them from onerous contracts and obsolescent hardware and appliances as they navigate their AI data storage initiatives into the new era. 

Interested in partnering with MinIO? Learn more here: https://min.io/partner-program.