IBM announces all-flash versions of its full DS8880 portfolio, but for the channel, impact is likely to be slight because compared to other IBM storage families, this one has a more limited partner presence.
HPE has announced the first major series of enhancements to the SMB-focused StoreVirtual 3200, which bring it up to the same capabilities of StoreVirtual systems higher in the market, and will make it much more attractive to partners.
The company says that performance, density and memory upgrades will make things like facial recognition of individual customers in retail stores a reality.
HDS adds top of the line models in both its all-flash F series, and hybrid flash G series, as well as the new SVOS 7 operating system.
What was formerly Project Nitro will hit the streets in 2017, with a single 4U Isilon Scale-Out system reaching a maximum of 924TB of capacity, 250,000 IOPS and up to 15GB/s of aggregate bandwidth in a 4-node cluster.
The growing flash businesses, strong partner services opportunities, and better leveraging of Arrow and Avnet have helped drive NetApp’s Canadian business in 2016.
The new software adds software based encryption, container support and major performance and latency increases that NetApp says will continue their momentum in flash and hybrid.
The announcements are geared at beefing up NetApp’s data analytics presence in mid-sized businesses, following up a related enterprise initiative earlier this year.
Tegile says its new scale-out platform, with flash prices starting at about 50 cents/GB, will make on-prem flash cheaper than the public cloud and thus give channel partners a powerful weapon.
Exablox unveils the OneBlox 5210, a scale-out low-cost flash product with object storage under the hood, that lists for $29,000 diskless, with 4 TB SSDs a further $2,000 each.
The AF1000 takes Nimble into the sub-$40k range for an all-flash array, which certainly isn’t the cheapest available on the market, but does offer a broad range of services and analytics.
The all-flash SIRIS 3 X1is available only with a TB drive, with the plan being to roll over further models if and when they meet customers’ price/performance needs.
The company has announced more details about its composable data fabric strategy, made possible by extending its StoreVirtual technology across all its form factors, to serve as the basis of its strategy for making software-defined ubiquitous in the date centre.
All-flash has been a many-faceted boon to the channel, and HPE’s new announcements will add some new opportunities for the company’s partners
NetApp has also strengthened, and is now giving much greater emphasis to, its flash-focused 3-4-5 guarantee to customers.
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.
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.
IBM says the three new all-flash models aimed at the higher end of the market will be a strong channel play.
While NetApp has some good Canadian partners, it doesn’t have enough of them. Accordingly, three months ago a new Canadian channel manager was appointed to rework the channel, giving a stronger focus around both flash and converged infrastructure, and making changes to the partner mix.
Tegile’s IntelliFlash HD storage array uses Tegile’s hybrid architecture, but with two types of flash, one layer being very dense and the other very fast. Tegile also announced a new entry level all-flash array, the T3550.
