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.
The new solutions are based on the newly released Microserver Gen10 Plus HPE released in February, which is half the size of its predecessor, with significantly greater performance.
Brand new hardware edge solutions begin with the Dell EMC PowerEdge XE2420 server, and the refridgerator-sized Modular Data CenterMicro 415.
Dell’s channel delivered good performance numbers in their now-completed Q2, but the big news for the channel in the quarter may be a pair of management changes at Dell that are related to larger organizational restructuring.
Supermicro also wants partners to make more use of Centres of Excellence to demonstrate POCs to customers.
In addition to the five new servers, which combine the high performance of the new AMD chips with Dell’s own IP, Dell is also announcing related management integrations and new Ready Solutions for HPC on these servers.
The first generation of AMD’s EPYC server processors re-established the company in that market, but was mainly a hyperscaler play. The market for the next-generation will be much broader, and a significant opportunity for Lenovo’s channel.
HPE enhances six of their SMB solutions, to provide more customer choice and provide additional performance and capacity.
Phil Vokins, Intel Channel Manager in Canada, emphasized that the new 2nd-Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors will greatly expand the ability of Canadian customers to use applications requiring dense memory.
While highlighting its new product, including the new Cascade Lake processors and Optane persistent memory, Intel focused on the way it highlights what they said was a fundamental transformation of the company.
While the sizzle in the new Intel server processors is the new Optane persistent memory, Dell EMC is emphasizing that new systems management software enhancements will optimize its potential over competitive servers.
Lenovo is announcing, and shipping, 15 new ThinkSystem servers and 5 ThinkAgile appliances, which are both optimized to work with Intel’s new Second Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, and add some additional wrinkles of their own.
While its large portfolio of SKUs for any and all use cases has always been a key part of Supermicro’s value proposition to the channel, they are emphasizing their Resource Saving Architecture’s power and saving capabilities in the refreshed models.
Chad Dunn, who runs HCI product management at Dell EMC, thinks the stars are aligned for hyperconverged to continue its breakneck growth rates this year
Nutanix broadens the server platforms on which its software is available with a new deal with Intel, which will see authorized Nutanix partners be able to brand and personalize the Intel server block platforms.
HPE made a big play in 2018 around servers in the SMB space, followed up by solutions related to hybrid cloud. While those will continue in 2019, the company is also looking to roll out similar initiatives around simplification around storage and hyper-converged solutions for SMBs.
The big announcement is that the composable capabilities of HPE Synergy has now been extended to rack server environments, but there are several other related goodies, including the expansion of the InfoSight predictive analytics from HPE Nimble beyond storage to all of the infrastructure.
The first Western Digital offering for this space is the Ultrastar DC ME200 Memory Extension Drive, which augments physical DRAM with between 4x-8x in memory capacity. It will be available to all WD channel partners.
Supermicro believes that the new Xeon chips will allow partners to do more with entry level servers than they have in the past.
The new solutions include the last two HPE ProLiant servers to be refreshed with Gen 10 technology, as well as software developed in collaboration with Microsoft, which includes new HPE Rapid Setup Software that HPE says will slash partner install times by up to 70 per cent.
