Project Harmony was the one new initiative specifically for partners announced at this year’s Dell Technologies World, within the context of a news-rich event which will create many other partner opportunities.
Dell makes some major announcements around their as-a-service portfolio, including bringing their Project Alpine previews from last year out as projects, in what they are saying brings the whole APEX strategy to fruition.
The block storage-focused A-series announcement is complemented by others updating their StorageGrid software and adding a new StorageGrid appliance, the extension of their ONTAP One software, a new version of their ONTAP software, and a Ransomware Recovery Guarantee.
Panasas has substantially evolved their portfolio in the last few years to become much more of a software company, and is working on skilling up their channel further to sell the new solutions.
Other storage families in the Dell portfolio are also announcing some upgrades, but PowerStore is the major one this time around.
While unified block and file storage systems have been around for some time, Pure says that they bolt management onto one primary system, whereas their new service manages blocks, files and VMs on an equal plane, allowing admins to have the native benefits of all.
Brennan sees the channel as critical to accelerating the success of their new midmarket-focused Artesca solution, and thinks some things can be done to the Go-to-Market generally which will pour more gas on the fire.
Pure says only the lack of a scale-out flash solution that is price compatible with disk has prevented the disruption of disk in the data centres, something the company says that they have now overcome with FlashBlade//E.
The new program has been simplified, reducing the number of tiers, and while benefits for top tier partners have been increased, it is also now easier for new partners to enter the program
Brand new is the AFF C-Series, a new all-flash QLC-based family, while the AFF A150 is a refresh of the entry level A-series model.
The latest in HPE’s cloud-native Alletra line comes in two models, a 1U one designed for extreme use cases and a 2U that fits a broader range of use cases.
The bundles will be available to channel partners exclusively through Climb Channel Solutions.
The company estimates this will cut costs by 20-25% for existing MSP360 partners, and up to 50% for those who switch from other backup products.
In addition to announcing the availability of BlueXP, NetApp also reiterated its commitment to ESG goals, which includes capabilities within BlueXP itself.
The distribution deal complements ScaleFlux’s channel expansion, which has seen the release of a product for partners, and the launch of their first partner program.
Lenovo announced enhanced collaborations with VMware around their ThinkAgile VX, TruScale Hybrid Cloud and the VMware Edge Compute Stack, as well as a partnership with Micron which uses their NVME SSDs, vSAN ESA and Lenovo ThinkAgile VX to provide all NVMe storage.
The Bulgaria-based scale-out provider has always specialized in providing high-value around a limited number of use cases, but with this release, is expanding the use cases that they support.
ScaleFlux sold its first two generations of computational storage SSDs direct, but the new series is more plug and play, so they are selling it through channel partners as well, and have built a channel program to facilitate this.
The model is based on drives rather than capacity, and the changes to the engine give customers confidence they can use maximum sized drives without concerns about restore times.
David Bennett comes over from Axcient, where he had been CEO, to take the same role at Object First.
