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.
This is Pure’s first out-of-the box option around a specific use case for Azure Cloud as they move beyond general purpose hybrid storage.
The event, which is being held from August 24-26 in and around Sydney, the largest town on Cape Breton Island, will bring together storage thought leaders, with a heavy emphasis on the YouTube world, and is open to the public.
The new offering adds an Opinionated AI stack and related services to Nutanix’s infrastructure and storage stacks, and the company believes it will find a good reception from the SMB to the enterprise.
The VAST DataStore, VAST DataBase and DataBase Engine combine to deliver on VAST’s long term plan of utilizing their storage technology for deep learning as well.
Last fall NetApp announced its new program, which they term an extension of the previous Unified Partner Program rather than a major overhaul of it, and after giving partners a suitable time to prepare for the new program, it is now operational.
These new data management solutions include new Storage Arrays that make it easier for organizations to enable AI workloads.
The extended partnership with Commvault follows up a major one with HPE early last year.
The FlashArray//X and FlashArray//C boast a 40% performance increase, while the FlashArray//E reaches the lowest end of the datacentre market, giving Pure and their partners an end-to-end offering.
Giancarlo emphasized that the long-awaited time has finally arrived when flash is now price-competitive with HDDs in the lower reaches of the data centre, and that Pure in particular enjoys competitive advantages in the market that will let them take advantage of this opportunity to the fullest.
With Pure’s portfolio expanded down to the lower reaches of the data centre, and flash reaching that long-sought price parity in that environment, both Pure and their partners think the potential for significant growth has arrived.
The new SLA guarantee is the first SLA that customers will have to purchase rather than get free as part of Evergreen, but it provides significant benefits on getting the customer new clean hardware for recovery, assisted by a Pure engineer onsite.
CTERA has added a third tier to their channel program to better differentiate and reward their most productive channel partners, and added new support to make them more efficient sellers.
The big one for many users will likely be the full integration of NAS with other backup types, which will save time and money on administration costs.
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.
