Nutanix sees its native file serving solution on the Nutanix Distributed File Storage Fabric as opening up a large new market for it displacing NAS servers, and bringing disruption to a NAS market they say has been ready for it for a while.
In addition to the FlashBlade, which becomes Pure’s new high end offering, the company also introduced the FlashArray//m10, a new entry level extension, to its FlashArray//m family, as well as several new FlashStack converged infrastructure solutions.
At a customer event in Toronto on Wednesday, NetApp CEO George Kurian laid out the company’s case to key customers and partners why the storage pioneer is well positioned for the new age of IT.
While NetApp has some good Canadian partners, it doesn’t have enough of them. Accordingly, three months ago a new Canadian channel manager was appointed to rework the channel, giving a stronger focus around both flash and converged infrastructure, and making changes to the partner mix.
PernixData has dealt direct with its channel in the past, but believes the time is right to take on distribution to accelerate sales of its software that improves the efficiency of storage in virtualized environments.
Tegile’s IntelliFlash HD storage array uses Tegile’s hybrid architecture, but with two types of flash, one layer being very dense and the other very fast. Tegile also announced a new entry level all-flash array, the T3550.
Mellanox thinks the Nutanix partnership can let Mellanox do for networking what Nutanix has already done for storage and compute – make it invisible. They also think it can grow their Ethernet switch business from the single digits to the neighborhood of their market leadership in Ethernet adapters.
The approved compatibility with Cisco allows any Cisco UCS server to be turned into the equivalent of a private Amazon S3 storage cloud, which is well suited for IoT requirements. More specific partner-focused announcements relating to this partnership are also coming.
Adding networking to the server, storage and virtualization capabilities of their HC3 solution gives Scale a complete bundle that responds to customer requests for such an addition.
Flash-focused Nimble Storage has announced its new Nimble AF-Series of All Flash arrays, a family of four models which adds predictive analytics. Nimble thinks it will position them better in the enterprise market.
VxRail has the same concept as last year’s unsuccessful EMC first foray into hyperconverged, but is designed to be much more flexible and modular, and benefits greatly from an improved software stack. It will also be available through all EMC partners, not just ones certified on VCE.
The aim of Cohesity, led by Nutanix’s original co-founder, is to disrupt the secondary storage market the same way Nutanix disrupted primary storage, and through a similar 100 per cent channel model.
Hitachi Data Systems continues to expand the functionality of its platform introduced in 2013 as a sync ‘n’ share variant of its Hitachi Content Platform with new and enhanced features.
Unitrends is implementing a program based on five stars, with partners earning credit for ranking based on sales, marketing, customer satisfaction, training and social media achievements, in a system that can let smaller partners and even influencers rise in the program.
Nutanix’s 4.6 software release enables key features to its platform announced last summer, as part of their longer-run strategy to be an Amazon-like infrastructure for the enterprise cloud.
Caringo sees its enhanced search capabilities as enabling Swarm’s ability to handle additional tasks, including facilitating Big Data analytics.
Using patent-pending data optimization and dedupe technology from an acquisition, HybriStor brings enormous scalability and performance to object-based storage.
The addition of SSD support to the HPE MSA 1040 also enables software enhancements which have been available on the flagship MSA 2040, and removes much of the feature gap between the two models.
New wizards and additional recovery options are also aimed at helping partners sell Arcserve UDP to larger customers than before.
The combination of the two companies give them what they believe are enormous synergies that can propel them to a leadership role in the hyperconverged space that neither company remotely aspired to when they were separate.
