Veritas Predictive Insights will be a core, free feature of their appliances, beginning initially with NetBackup Appliances and extending to Access and Flex appliances next year.
Certification on SAP HANA is exceedingly important for HCI vendors, because it validates that HCI will run in a demanding Tier One environment, and opens up a market where enormous pent-up demand exists, that has just been waiting for this validation.
Bassam Hemdan, Commvault’s Canadian county manager, discussed the recent changes to Commvault’s portfolio and policies and their impact in the Canadian market.
In what CEO Bob Hammer calls the key to Commvault’s strategy, the company has expanded its appliance from the original model into a full family, with a smaller one node offering for remote offices below it in the market, and a much denser model for larger deployments.
Features likely to be of significant interest to the partner community include new Android on-demand capability, as well as deployment capability on AWS as well as Azure.
Veeam CEO Peter McKay credited Veeam’s expansion of their strategic relationships as critical to their success in 2017, and indicated they plan significant further expansion here going forward.
In addition to the souped-up servers, Dell EMC has also simplified the ordering process by which partners acquire these HCI appliances.
In addition to upgrades to VxRail, VxRack SDDC, both their Enterprise and Native hybrid clouds, and new turnkey VMware Ready Systems for ‘do it yourself’ cloud deployments, Dell EMC also announced GA for XtemIO X2 and an upgrade of their Dell Data Protection Suite for Applications.
While VxRail was originally aimed more at the mid-market, unexpected orders for large numbers of nodes from enterprise customers has led Dell EMC to add more enterprise features to the new 4.5 release of the appliances.
Unitrends sees both the new anti-ransomware capability, and two enhancements which make Unitrends more attractive to enterprises, as important differentiators for partners.
ScoutShield uses technology from LookingGlass’s 2015 acquisitions of CloudShield and Cyveillance to create a Threat Intelligence Gateway that integrates with the LookingGlass ScoutVison threat intelligence platform.
The offering with Citrix provides the same capabilities of the latest version of a VMRail VMware solution announced at last year’s Dell EMC World, and gives Dell partners an offering for their Citrix focused customers.
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.
Atlantis also announced a new relationship with Dell, the only major OEM for whom its software was not customized when the first Atlantis hyperconverged products were announced last year.
Distil is looking to supplement its direct sales with a significant partner presence, offering an enterprise grade proactive solution, which is very specific and complements other security solutions, and now a partner program to offer support.
Hyper-converged vendor SimpliVity will seek to grow its market in Canada with an exclusive distribution pact with Tech Data Canada.
Dell channel chief Cheryl Cook also provides a broad update on issues of specific interest to the Dell SonicWALL channel.
The scalability of the old eVault solutions has been massively increased up to 400 per cent, so Seagate is rebranding them with the Seagate name and looking to extend them into the enterprise data centre market, as well as the ROBO space where they play today.
Unitrends only added a channel component to their business in 2013, and now are dispensing with direct entirely to give partners the confidence their vendor won’t poach deals from them, which will in turn encourage them to invest more in Unitrends.
Scheduled to roll out in Q3, the updates to the portfolio address specific use cases. They are: support for KVM, including Nutanix’s new KVM-based hypervisor; a storage-heavy Lite-Compute node; a new appliance that provides Nvidia GPU support; and a short-depth, 1U form factor appliance.
