The interesting thing here is that Nutanix has expanded the Cisco support on its own, without Cisco being involved in the validation process. That supports the two companies’ earlier stated position that no partnership where Nutanix would be sold on UCS was in the works. This move may, however, indicate that Nutanix is trying to create momentum towards it.
The enhancements include a major improvement to the platform’s performance as well as the ability to now handle physical protection as well as virtual.
Nutanix sees the drone as an extension of its core webscale philosophy of using software on commodity hardware to make it much more extensible. Down the line, they see this as having application to use cases which will interest channel partners.
The cloud migration and DR vendor is leveraging its partnership with Nutanix and support for Nutanix’s AHV supervisor to add new customers, including ones in Canada.
At its .NEXT event, Nutanix has been stressing that the company needs to reinvent itself, moving beyond its hyper-converged base, despite the considerable risks in its larger objective of becoming a platform company that can redefine the datacentre’s private cloud.
Two of Nutanix’s top Canadian partners discuss the evolution of their companies’ relationship with Nutanix, from early days to the present and how they have become successful partnering with the company, while taking somewhat different strategies.
Nutanix has unveiled a host of related announcements, including enhancements in its upcoming July 4.7 release that will add support for containerized and physical environments, supporting everything in a single platform.
Chris Morgan assessed his success in executing on his priorities in this first year on the job, and considers the channel impact of Nutanix’s emphasis in 2016 of the big picture beyond simply saving money through hyper-converged solutions.
Pluribus partnered with both Dell and Nutanix a year ago, and is benefiting from being the software-defined networking element in joint deals. They also believe the upcoming Dell-EMC merger will help their business.
Nutanix is making changes to its channel strategies around this product, including deal registration, to avoid channel confusion. Lenovo and its channel will also play a key role taking Xpress to market.
Nutanix’s president acknowledged that the industry’s previous announced attempts at a low-cost VDI solution have been basically junk, which have left customers suspicious of such claims. Nutanix InstantON VDI for Citrix, on the other hand, is an enterprise-capable turnkey solution, which really will come in in the $500 price range, including the endpoint.
The Lenovo announcements included three joint offerings with integrators around SAP HANA, SAP-related data warehousing and memory announcements, and a hyper-converged sofolution r SAP Business suite applications stemming from their partnership with Nutanix.
A month ago, Robert Yelenich moved from country manager of Commvault in Canada over to Nutanix, replacing Anton Granic, who had been promoted. Yelenich recently sat down with ChannelBuzz to discuss Nutanix’s Canadian plans for 2016.
Beefing up the offerings owned by organizations soon likely to be owned by Dell comes as no surprise, but the vendor also strongly restated its support for its Nutanix-based XC line, while beefing it up as well, and said it’s not going anywhere.
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.
The multi-cloud application delivery solutions vendor has been focused mainly on public cloud infrastructure providers, but they are broadening out into the enterprise, and see Nutanix, with its strong presence in private and hybrid clouds, as a key route to market there.
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 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.
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.
Lenovo channel chief Sammy Kinlaw said raising System x server sales is his top priority for the year, as some partners still don’t sell these at all.
