Lenovo’s ThinkSystem servers have long been certified on SAP HANA, but this is the first certification of their ThinkAgile HCI line with Nutanix, which they see as both a strong validation that HCI is ready for the enterprise, and a great market opportunity.
NetApp asked its partners to place bets this year on the cloud, on HCI and on all-flash, with the first two acknowledged as being a significant ask for some partners. Almost two quarters in, the company said that results so far have been good.
Axellio has only had its new product portfolio on the market for a little over a year, but has met with a strong response for their edge solutions in the performance part of the market, and just introduced a new HCI solution in partnership with Microsoft that is based on the Microsoft software-defined stack.
Violin Systems, which is focused on the high end of the performance storage market, reaches down to acquire the SME-focused storage business of X-IO Storage. The long-term goal is to fully integrate both technologies to provide high-end systems with the price-performance advantages of the X-IO technology.
Dell EMC’s quarterly Partner Broadcast was mainly about recounting their many trumps in the first half of the year, but there was some new news here which will interest their channel partners.
Cohesity has doubled the amount of dollars allocated to their partner program, with new perks like rebates for sales to very large customers and formalized and expanded MDF. They have also established a model for service providers within the program, which provides mechanisms like consumption-based pricing suited to this business model.
The HCI part of the portfolio introduces the first NVMe offering, while new support on the CI side was announced that will support very large deployments, and a refresh of the Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Advisor’s management and orchestration software was announced.
With a year in the books since the launch of Hitachi Vantara, and five months into a brand new partner program, the company looks at the evolution of the channel changes that accompanied its own reinvention of itself, and what more remains to be done.
Lenovo’s enhanced relationship with Veeam is but one part of a much broader initiative they are announcing Thursday at their Lenovo Transform event.
Cisco and Veeam partnered around HyperFlex over a year ago around a direct snapshot integration for HyperFlex primary storage. Now they are extending that partnership with a new integration on the secondary side that leverages enhancements made in HyperFlex 3.0.
Lenovo and Pivot3 are formally announcing their Smart City initiative, which has already been operational in the field, with a number of significant customer wins.
The big opportunity here is for Pivot3 partners who sell into the military/intel part of the U.S. defense space, but other NATO countries can be sold it as well, and it also has other use cases in rugged environments.
Helios is the first SaaS-based application on top of the Cohesity platform, something that was always part of the company’s vision, and which provides new data and app orchestration and management capabilities.
Kevin Connolly talks with ChannelBuzz about the recent performance of Dell EMC Canada Commercial, and their progress in resolving alignment issues which still have some presence even through the formal integration between Dell and EMC is long past.
Growth in the consumer market is a critical part of the Lenovo strategy Zielinski laid out, but channel reinvigoration, particularly in the SMB space, is also vital.
Cohesity says that the achievement of the AWS Storage Competency validation will assist them significantly on the technology front, as well as in sales and in marketing.
Chad Sakac, Pivotal’s SVP Strategic Alliances, talks with ChannelBuzz about his new role, sorts out the Dell Technologies and Pivotal strategy around PKS, and explains why more of the channel needs to give PKS more attention.
The Channel Charter – Nutanix’s new channel program – is designed to encourage partners to move beyond HCI to the cloud, while also allowing smarter partners who are deeply focused on Nutanix to qualify for the program’s top tier.
A new flexible consumption model for partners to sell is the big channel play here, although the product enhancements, including a new all-flash configuration option are also significant.
The HPE SimplVity 2600, which is the first SimpliVity that is entirely software-optimized, is being pitched at the VDI market to start, but the company thinks its flexibility will eventually take it beyond that.
