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.
The new model, designed for a single processor Lenovo SR250 server, is aimed at chains with very small deployments which typically have been using a PC at these remote sites.
Both the new StorSecure Encryption and Key Management capability, which removes the need for third party key management products, and the KVM support significantly lower the total cost of a StorMagic deployment, an important consideration considering most of their deployments are small ones.
A major innovation in Nutanix Files 3.5 is support for the new CFT incremental backup capability, something that Commvault is the first data protection vendor to support.
Other Xi services seeing significant new feature enhancements are IoT, Era and Leap.
The big news, early support for Nutanix Mine, comes later this year, but other new capabilities kick in right away.
Reliant Technologies Solutions Group talked with ChannelBuzz about the development of their Nutanix business and their experience at last week’s .NEXT event.
Nutanix announced their new Mine backup-as-a-service offering, with Veeam as the design partner, and with both companies looking to use it to enhance their place at the centre of their own ecosystems.
