Hitachi Vantara and Virtana have announced a new collaboration with AI-powered monitoring and observability vendor Virtana, which will integrate Virtana’s suite with the Hitachi Vantara EverFlex infrastructure-as-a-service offering.
Backblaze will leverage the new partnership to open its first data region in Canada, which will be based in Toronto, service the whole country, and become available in the first quarter of 2025.
Hitachi Vantara adds another component to its newish hybrid cloud platform, with yet another on the way.
The extended partnership with Nutanix, which Dell will formally announce at a later date, was accompanied in Dell’s new channel related moves by other initiatives like a new Dell AI Partner Focused Network, and the addition of client to server and storage for partner of record status.
In addition to the Virtual Storage Platform One launch, Hitachi Vantara has announced its inaugural Sustainability Report.
Both partnerships expand AI capabilities by combining VAST’s software with NVIDIA and Super Micro’s hardware, with more such partnerships on the way.
Object First’s Ootbi now has over 80 installations for Veeam environments, with six of them worth over $100,000, as they stress how their storage immutability and Zero Trust capabilities are effective weapons against ransomware.
While these major changes are not good news for developers and SMBs, there are still options, from the cloud to smaller hypervisor vendors like Proxmox, which has an open source hypervisor that led storage vendor 45Drives to partner with them.
Back on its own, following the bankruptcy of former parent company StorCentric last year, Nexsan adds a new high-end model with immutable backups and S3 object locking.
The new architecture disaggregates the storage from the compute, and is a key factor in both the much lower pricing and the greatly increased scalability.
The Sovereign Cloud integration brings the VMware compliance technology to enterprise storage, while the modernization of APIs between ONTAP and VMware vSphere improves the scalability and effectiveness of VMware’s VVols architecture.
Other enhancements to the NetApp storage portfolio include enhancements to NetApp Keystone Storage-as-a-Service.
The digital portal allows partners to track deals and register opportunities, and while the previous program has something similar, NetApp’s channel chief says that this one is better.
George Kurian explained NetApp’s broad strategy through which their customers can turn disruption into opportunity, through consolidating data management, treating data like the key product it is, and developing a modern data architecture.
The new feature, which is free in this initial release, will deliver the biggest benefit to larger enterprises, but will also be attractive to smaller companies at the edge, as well as to MSPs.
Other new offerings include Pure Protect, a new resilience and DRaaS product line and improvements to the service experience.
While the previous Go Purple partner program was more of a bare-bones effort, the new Luminary Partner Program is better attuned to the company’s Cloud First strategy, and more complete, although formal certifications won’t arrive till next year.
Tintri has also switched to a 100% channel model, and is currently restructuring their channel program.
Object First, created by Veeam’s two co-founders and run by former Webroot and Axcient CEO David Bennett, focuses on immutability and ransomware recovery, and as a year-old startup, is looking for more partners to get their message out to customers.
Multi-cloud has become one of VMware’s top focus areas, and the new and enhanced offerings include vSAN Max, which allows storage to be disaggregated and scale independently from compute, as well as new multi-cloud virtual private clouds for storage and networking.
