EMC Canada channel chief Michael Kerr gives a specifically Canadian take on the pending merger with Dell, as well as initial partner reaction to some of the new product announcements from EMC World.
Canadian channel chief Michael Kerr acknowledged that getting partners to commit to EMC as the partners are transitioning their businesses to add cloud capabilities and cutting-edge technologies to their practice is often a challenge. It’s also one factor in recognition as a top EMC partner.
The new Web-scale object storage platform will extend on-prem EMC storage and backup applications into the cloud, and continue the trend of requiring the assistance of more channel partners than had been the case when Virtustream was acquired.
Scale’s new HEAT technology brings flash into hybrid tiering, with all the performance benefits of using flash for a tier rather than just a cache. The challenge here was not introducing flash, but doing so in a way that would not increase complexity, and would be cost-effective for SMBs.
Many details still have not yet been determined, or cannot be made public, but at EMC World, Dell and EMC indicated some additional information about what the massive new organization would look like, and be called, once the merger is complete.
Unity is aimed at the mid-market all-flash segment of the market, under XtremIO, and EMC believes that unlike the VNXe family, this will be a truly successful volume product.
Datto is looking to disrupt a highly commoditized market, attract a significant number of new prospects for its channel, and provide upgrade options to better monetize the offering.
IBM says the three new all-flash models aimed at the higher end of the market will be a strong channel play.
The enhancements to the HDS unified storage platform aimed at the enterprise and mid-market also now allow cloud tiering from the appliance itself, and new support for VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes assists performance in virtualized environments.
Integrating the capabilities acquired from Connected Data’s Transporter appliances gives Nexsan what they believe will be a completely differentiated unified storage offering.
The Dell SD7000-S, which is fully supported and serviced by Dell, features 6.9 PB of storage on a rack and is aimed at customers with large amounts of unstructured data.
Asigra looks to fill a void in the marketplace by providing its MSPs with a tool for snapshot management in AWS, which will assist partners with workload migrations to AWS and provide a service for which they can charge.
Kevin Peesker used his lead keynote at Dell Canada’s large customer event in Toronto to address fact and fiction about the approaching EMC acquisition, with the pink fluffy unicorns of myth taking pride of place in his discussion.
A month ago, Robert Yelenich moved from country manager of Commvault in Canada over to Nutanix, replacing Anton Granic, who had been promoted. Yelenich recently sat down with ChannelBuzz to discuss Nutanix’s Canadian plans for 2016.
Channel-focused scale-out NAS provider Qumulo, which integrates real-time data analytics directly into storage, expands its hardware appliance line and announces a partnership with Western Digital for its HGST 10TB Hard Drives for its appliances.
FalconStor supplements their FreeStor platform introduced last year with Intelligent Predictive Analytics, which provides both real-time and historical analytics to optimize management.
Tintri makes several significant changes to its channel program reflecting its broader solution range and partner base, and adds Promark to Arrow for its North American distribution.
Beefing up the offerings owned by organizations soon likely to be owned by Dell comes as no surprise, but the vendor also strongly restated its support for its Nutanix-based XC line, while beefing it up as well, and said it’s not going anywhere.
The multi-hypervisor disaster recovery orchestration engine, which also works with Veeam Backup & Replication, is designed to let enterprises easily execute, test and document DR plans, and should provide partners with additional consulting opportunities.
The Toronto-based startup, which sells entirely through the channel, has created a three stage program to show potential customers who are educating themselves about software-defined storage how ioFABRIC’s differentiated solution for managed I/O allocation can meet their business needs
