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.
Details are pretty high level at this stage, and a Chinese cloud solutions venture will be China-focused — at least in the short term. There are, however, other elements which Lenovo channel partners will find of interest.
Xinuos, which purchased SCO’s UNIX server products, is now releasing an entirely new version of the OS, hoping that leveraging market conditions and fond memories of the legacy SCO product will lead non-legacy customers and partners to look past damage to the brand done by SCO’s management in its later years.
The hyperconverged startup emphasizes the end product, a highly scalable out-of-the-box private cloud initially focused on development and testing environments, rather than the hyperconverged label itself, which they think has been somewhat overused.
Lenovo sees strong momentum in its server business, with its core server business showing signs of beginning to scale growth, and its roster of hyperconverged partners offering significant potential in that space.
For partners, the most interesting thing here may be the Small Business Marketplace e-commerce platform, an explicitly channel-focused online site, rather than a direct-to-customer site that competes with partners. It’s in pilot now in the U.S., but when it will be in Canada is not yet clear.
The enhancements to the four new 1U servers include their integration with Dell’s systems management portfolio, which provide tools that reduce deployment time by up to 40 per cent, and also provide streamlined management.
Nutanix sees the Lenovo deal as equal in importance to the Dell one inked last year and said its announcement shortly after Dell’s purchase of EMC is a coincidence. The plan is to get jointly branded products to market through Lenovo in Q1 of 2016.
Dell pledges that the changes made to internal sales and its relationship to the channel will continue, because they have invested so much in it that major change would be foolish.
Lenovo announces its second hyperconverged partnership this week, which like the first is focused primarily on the SMB space, where Lenovo is initially focusing with its hyperconverged strategy.
Lenovo teams up with software-defined storage vendor StorMagic to offer three new hyperconverged offerings. They are unlikely to be their last.
The new CS 250 is a much-enhanced followup to the appliance HP first announced in December at HP Discover, and which came to market earlier this year.
The company’s new SavageStor architecture features 12 SAS lanes with 25 GB/s throughput, part of a design intended to completely remove bottlenecks inside the server and address needs of customers who require high performance and throughput.
Dell indicated good progress on their green fields discount initiative, overall commercial business, and partner education efforts. While the number of partners using Dell financing jumped considerably in Q1, the company wants more participation there. Plus, still no firm date on when Dell will team up with SYNNEX in Canada.
Dell’s hardware designers explain their original mandate, to turn Dell from a follower to a leader in product innovation, and discuss their design philosophy and principles that underlay the large degree of success they have in this area now compared to a decade ago.
The company has put measures in place to drive North American server sales through the channel, and while it is still a distant fourth in server revenues, they are eager to make up ground this year.
Stratoscale emerged from stealth late last year with some powerful vendor investors, a unique hyperconverged value proposition and a 100 per cent channel strategy. The plan is for the product to be available this summer.
Dell says its new 4U, 4 socket rack offering will offer a much better price-performance alternative to legacy RISC-based systems, and one that should appeal to partners who serve the Big Data analytics market.
Savision, a Dutch company who makes business service and cloud management solutions for Microsoft System Center, but whose R&D is mainly in Canada, has released a new dashboarding tool for System Center Operations Manager aimed at more technical users, which complements their flagship Live Maps solution
Nine separate bundles across the Windows, VMware and Linux platforms give SanDisk a broad range of “device+software” solutions for server-side solid-state caching.
