The new StorMagic appliance, leveraging its relationship with two of their strategic partners, will go to market through the Cisco channel.
John Glendenning, StorMagic’s SVP of Sales and Business Development
Bristol U.K.-based hyperconverged vendor StorMagic has announced an expansion of their partnerships with both Cisco and Citrix, through a new edge appliance designed for Citrix Workspace Service, and which will go to market through Cisco and its channel partners. The joint solution has been validated as Citrix Ready through the Citrix Ready HCI Workspace Appliance Program.
StorMagic has transitioned from a largely direct selling model to a 100 per cent channel one over the last couple of years, and in addition have an aggressive strategic partnering strategy which allows them to leverage these other vendors’ channels as well.
“StorMagic became a Citrix certified partner about a year ago, and in January of this year we were included in a Citrix preview for the Citrix Cloud Connector,” said John Glendenning, StorMagic’s SVP of Sales and Business Development. “We built an installer that allows you to connect to the Citrix cloud and configure a StorMagic HCI cluster to the Citrix cloud. We are now announcing the General Availability of that and the first edge appliances related to it, which are designed for Cisco cloud services.”
StorMagic’s focus is on the enterprise edge – smaller two server deployments, but which are often in very large numbers and with very large customers.
“The important thing is that these types of workloads are increasingly dealt with at the edge, which plays to our strengths,” Glendenning said. “At the Citrix Synergy show floor, we have had several conversations with big global brands around this.”
StorMagic and Cisco have both validated Citrix Cloud workloads on Cisco ISR 4000 routers with UCS E-Series blade servers, in a 2U footprint. The solution delivers secure enterprise-grade networking, compute and storage for the edge, specifically for remote or branch sites that require virtualized user desktops and/or remote access management capabilities to run locally, while being managed directly from the Citrix Cloud.
“Connecting to the Citrix Cloud makes it a fully managed cloud from a 2U footprint,” Glendenning said.
Because StorMagic is available globally through the Cisco price list, any Cisco partner can deliver it anywhere in the world.
“The Cisco channel is extremely familiar with enterprise networking, although less with the E Series blade,” Glendenning said. “The fact that this blade is in a 2U footprint is pretty amazing. We know that Cisco has a lot of products, and our task is to get us, and this offering, into the channel consciousness. We will work hard to make this stand out. Our job is to educate them about the power of the E Series blade. We are confident that if we get the messaging right, it will be an obvious choice. We are a Solutions Plus partner with Cisco, and have many deployed customers with them. We will make it as easy as possible for Cisco and their channel people to deliver this combined solution.”
The Cisco routers with the StorMagic software and E-Series blades are available now.
“We do believe there is pent up demand out there for this,” Glendenning said.
