The changes to the Pure channel program and go-to-market motions are extremely significant, impacting most things except for Pure’s commitment to a 100 per cent channel strategy.
While multiple backup vendors have snapshot integrations around Pure’s FlashArray//M array, integrations for the AI-focused Pure FlashBlade are rarer.
The model that Pure Storage outlined as their path forward is not a net-new, as it is built on technology like last year’s FlashBlade//X and Gartner’s Shared Accelerated Storage category. It is, however, a differentiated strategy within the industry, that Pure believes will drive it to great heights.
While many customers are still on the fence about NVMe adoption in its early days, Pure Storage is making it easier for them to buy FlashArray//X now and upgrade later, by making the upgrade path simple, and changing pricing policies to encourage people to buy //X now.
AIRI Mini is a joint engineering initiative between Pure and NVIDIA that provides an AI-focused solution with much less compute capability than AIRI, announced in March. It thus has a much lower entry point, and the companies think it will lead to strong interactions between infrastructure teams and data scientists.
Pivot3 is stressing that while other HCI vendors have intelligent hybrid cloud strategies, they have one that is in production today.
Hitachi Data Instance Director, which had been around Hitachi Data Services since 2008, gets an updating from integration with Hitachi Content Platform and analytics technologies which came in the formation of Hitachi Vantara.
Panzura’s hybrid cloud NAS gains an additional use case with the certification, which will enable joint Veeam and Panzura solutions for cloud-native VM backup and DR in any public or private cloud.
INFINIDAT and Veeam come originally from different segments of the market, but have partnered around an enterprise play, and INFINIDAT is looking to enlist some of Veeam’s top solution providers to increase their own ranks of ‘go-to’ partners.
Rozo Systems, which has been based mainly in the media and entertainment vertical, sells entirely through a select partner channel. They are now looking to augment that channel, and to that end, have introduced their first partner program.
ExaGrid recently unveiled a new top-of-the-line appliance, and entered into a Nutanix-focused parternshp with data protection provider HYCU.
The two new models include the first quad-processor environments for Nutanix environments, and a new edge appliance that can be as small as 1U. The new Life Cycle Management capability may, however, be what excites customers most about the new announcements.
Hitachi Vantara expands their midrange offerings for both all-flash and hybrid platforms and extends their flat service model from the all-flash series to their hybrid series as well.
NetApp becomes the first vendor to actually ship a NVMe fabric solution, with the AFF A800.
The new Nimble arrays are also fully enabled for SCM and NVMe for when HPE supports them on these models, but the support is not yet there out of the gate.
Technology from the latest 14th generation PowerEdge servers significantly beefs up both the new Vxrail and VxRack offerings.
Dell EMC also announced that native replication has been added to EMC XtremIO, and a ew entry point X-Brick XtremIO system at up to a 55 per cent lower cost than the previous generation.
At their Global Partner Summit kicking off their Dell Technologies World, Dell EMC delineated their channel strategy for the year ahead, and a lengthy list of program offerings designed to help execute it.
Diamond Lauffin, the founder of Nexsan and its disk-to-disk technology, is the Chief Evangelist and Design Architect at Storbyte, which is offering a 10-year warranty with a 100 per cent write guarantee on their arrays.
Liquidware also thinks that the capability to save directly to the AWS, Microsoft and Google object storage clouds, which is a first in this space, will also appeal to customers with a hybrid desktop computing strategy, who are not yet ready for a full move to DaaS.
