The Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) 4.0 release makes significant enhances to Hitachi UCP Advisor, and adds important new SAP and VMware certifications.
Nutanix follows up their recent partnership with AWS with a second major cloud infrastructure partnership, designed to emphasize the importance of the company’s focus now on hybrid cloud infrastructure.
The Nutanix Channel Charter, introduced only two years ago, will run in parallel with the Elevate program until all partners have made their competency choices, with all partners being grandfathered under the Channel Charter benefits until then.
Nutanix’s flurry of new product news follows a general theme of moving from HCI where they began to a broader hybrid cloud infrastructure story.
While the Microsoft and Diamanti solutions are complete net-news, the expansion of the Nutanix ThinkAgile HX portfolio to include the first AMD models in the Lenovo HCI portfolio may be the biggest news.
The new enhancements, upgrading Pivot3’s Intelligence Engine to include both a system-level upgrade orchestration and a health and a best practices analyzer, are targeted at the video security market that makes up much of Pivot3’a business.
The new offering is a bundle of existing components, adding Acronis Backup and a choice of partner VDI offerings to the Scale HC3 platform, but it is purpose-built for organizations looking to protect home-based workforces.
Dell also announces its first AMD-powered VxRail offering, as well as some new capabilities based on the most recent announcements to the VxRail HCI System software.
While the 2nd generation AMD EPYC processors contribute new efficiencies, the big breakthrough here is the new Lenovo servers delivering dual socket performance with a single socket, as well as density and versatility enhancements.
Edge-focused Scale isn’t charging into the data centre market here, but rather responding to customer requests for an offering that can handle use cases like high density VDI deployments.
Jeff MacMillan, founder and CEO of Victoria-based KeyNexus, becomes StorMagic’s CTO, with responsibility for the whole company’s technology strategy.
The Lenovo ThinkAgile MX1021 is a turnkey HCI appliance designed around the Microsoft Azure Stack for edge use cases, while the ThinkSystem DM7100 is an NVMe-powered unified storage array whose tiering capabilities are well suited to hybrid cloud strategies.
Scale has seen their initial partnership with Acronis around Acronis Backup to be a major competitive displacement advantage for partners, and are looking to extend that further with the Acronis cloud backup solution.
Multi-cluster support is new in the 2.0 release, as is support for nodes with more capacity, with the result being stronger ability to support more Big Data applications.
With HPE having end-of-lifed their StoreVirtual family, StorMagic has been selected as a replacement for the HPE StoreVirtual VSA in edge deployments where HPE SimpliVity would be overkill.
The new Cohesity solution for ROBO is specifically designed for either HPE or Cisco servers, and those vendors and their joint channel partners with Cohesity are the Go-to-Market for this.
Based on Intel’s Gen 10 NUC, the small form factor HE150 has the same software stack as Scale’s HC3 appliance, but is aimed at even smaller sites without even a small server closet, as it takes up only the space as three stacked smartphones.
Pivot3’s heavy video surveillance business means they have a rough balance of IT and OT partners, and the new program has a greater focus on teaching both to speak the other’s language.
StorMagic extends its ecosystem of large server vendor partners with HPE, although this one, unlike others with Lenovo, Dell and Cisco, is a technology integration rather than a Go-to-Market mechanism.
Christian Alvarez, who comes over from Juniper where he was Global Channel Chief, also pledges a focus on simplicity, and to do a good job of listening to partners.
