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.
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
