NetApp has presented an impressive array of new commitments to partners, but in return in for reciprocal commitment in return, specifically selling NetApp’s newer solution areas.
Western Digital is looking to drive massive change on two fronts. They are emphasizing their strong enterprise data centres today, and that the company is about far more than low-cost JBODs and consumer drives. They are also emphasizing their ability to play a key role in driving the technology of he data centre of the future.
Western Digital is emphasizing its centrality to the data centre of the future, while simultaneously refreshing their data centre capabilities of the present with a refresh of their Data Center Systems.
The new program is basically a change in the pricing structure that moves software costs into a subscription-based OpEx model, which Scale partners with an MSP practice can use to increase their profitability.
The NetApp strategic priorities for the new fiscal year will have implications for their sales strategy. Here’s how that strategy will affect the channel.
NetApp’s cloud business is still fairly small, but their offerings will roll out in force this year, and NetApp wants customers to lead with them – a strategic decision that would have seemed bizarre not long ago, but is now central to the new NetApp.
At their C3 partner event this week, NetApp exhorted partners to ramp up their efforts to sell NetApp’s new HCI offering based on Solidfire technology, while not letting up on their FlexPod CI activities.
While the new Velocity program is not focused solely on Lenovo, Lenovo is actively participating in it, with new HX product bundles and a new software HCI product which is also well suited for enterprise customers.
NetApp CEO George Kurian kicked off NetApp’s second C3 partner conference by outlining the company’s three-pronged strategy to drive business in the year ahead, and asking partners to increase their commitment to NetApp to match the increased commitment NetApp is making to them.
1space is also a new open source project, and is joined as new SwiftStack open source endeavours by MetaSync, which like 1space, also brings new multi-cloud technologies to the open source community.
Qumulo combines their extreme scale-out Qumulo File Fabric software in a dense 1U box with dense 12TB drives powered by a system-on-a-chip, to provide a new lower-cost offering designed to make archives much more accessible to users than has been the case until now.
The Archive360 Archive2Azure platform now has eight modules, which are purchased separately, allowing customers to tailor their solution to their organization’s specific needs.
Dell EMC finally made its long-awaited breakthrough in storage in the first quarter – even though on a year-over-year basis, channel storage business was actually down. It’s seen as more of a statistical fluke, rather than the harbinger of an unwanted trend, and considerable confidence around storage exists going forward.
In a related announcement, Maxta announces a new relationship with large account reseller Connection, which will be able to leverage these new pre-configured appliances.
The vertical solution is FlexPod Datacenter for Epic EHR, and the short-range strategy is to roll out additional solutions for the health care vertical – including additional ones for EHR – and then move to other verticals.
The HPE Smart Fabric Orchestrator provides the same capabilities for Ethernet that HP’s Smart SAN does for Fibre Channel, while the new M-Series SN2010M is a smaller switch for the secondary storage market.
The new configurations were facilitated by some of the enhancements in the new Scality RING 7.4 software, which has improving ease of use as its primary focus.
Assureon Cloud Transfer is Nexsan’s first cloud offering, but the company is pledging that it won’t be the last.
The HPE Complete program, in existence since late 2016 in what amounted to beta form, has now been opened to General Available, allowing all HPE partners, including those outside the U.S., to participate.
Intelligent data management startup Komprise has also expanded their distribution network, signing on Lifeboat to complement original distribution partner Synnex
