Commvault becomes the first data protection vendor to offer support for Nutanix’s own hypervisor, improving the capabilities of their customers and partners in the Nutanix environment.
The Windows-focused virtualization management optimization vendor provides a detailed update, including their relationship with Citrix and other co-opetitors, their channel policies, and where they see their market going.
While some of the channel changes announced at Citrix Summit have less relevance to Canada than in other geos, the core themes Citrix emphasized of increased focus and channel co-operation found a welcome reception.
An appliance originally designed to bring Citrix into the low end of the market has had its scalability increased more than tenfold, now supporting up to 5000 users. Dell also announced its new ThinOS software, which now supports Skype for Business, and is backwards compatible into the existing install base.
While Citrix did not unveil any new technology products at its Summit event, it did talk extensively about its product strategy.
VMware’s decision to stop OEMing the Artisan’s Neverfail technology for VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat has led Artisan to provide such capabilities in its core product, including application protection for vCloud Server Virtual Machines.
Programmatic initiatives to back trending areas is something VMware is telling partners they can expect to see more of in 2016.
Scale, which is distinct among the hyperconverged vendors with its SMB focus, is not new to Canada, but they have added new staff and resources here, and developed new relationships with key DMRs to take their Canadian business to the next level.
The new HP T730 Thin Client is a performance machine can support four UHD/4k displays natively, and six displays with an optional AMD FirePro discrete graphics card, to deliver what for the moment is a unique product in the market.
Nutanix sees the Lenovo deal as equal in importance to the Dell one inked last year and said its announcement shortly after Dell’s purchase of EMC is a coincidence. The plan is to get jointly branded products to market through Lenovo in Q1 of 2016.
Deepening enterprise penetration, increasing cloud business, and improving attach rate on partner VMware and Microsoft sales are at the top of Veeam’s agenda for this year.
The latest addition to Veeam’s free offerings for its community is aimed mainly at Linux servers running in the cloud, but also supports physical Linux servers, and will offer partners ways to monetize it, though some may be down the road.
Veeam is emphasizing that partners not in the cloud need to develop a cloud option for their customers, and opened their VeeamON event by announcing a simple-to-use portal to help partners develop a service provider practice.
The Wyse products have had their own specific support packages since they were acquired by Dell, but the increasing visibility of the Dell ProSupport brand, and the availability of some new services not previously available to Dell Wyse has led to the change.
NexGen also announced the finalization of its Canadian distribution, which should help improve a Canadian channel which is not yet as strong as they would like.
The company is also announcing a new version of its FVP Freedom software, the free version of their FVP software which they say gives away for free the same thing that hybrid vendors sell on top of their arrays.
At a customer event in Toronto Wednesday, Nutanix presented the audience with a full-throated positioning of themselves as well ahead of their competition, and also gave an update on their progress in Canada
VMware’s new Evo SDDC spec takes its converged architecture play into the high end, aiming to simply create software-defined data centres.
New Certified Partner Architectures under the VMware Validated Design program provide partners a route to building their own data centre stacks.
VMware’s new North American structure will mean access to new resources to help Canadian partners evolve their services play, Donna Wittmann says.
