The two companies have been long-time partners around VDI, but this extension of their relationship makes a very low cost hyper-converged offering, which combines Atlantis’ hyper-converged infrastructure with the full Xen stack, available to any certified Citrix partner.
Nutanix is making changes to its channel strategies around this product, including deal registration, to avoid channel confusion. Lenovo and its channel will also play a key role taking Xpress to market.
Nutanix’s president acknowledged that the industry’s previous announced attempts at a low-cost VDI solution have been basically junk, which have left customers suspicious of such claims. Nutanix InstantON VDI for Citrix, on the other hand, is an enterprise-capable turnkey solution, which really will come in in the $500 price range, including the endpoint.
The Lenovo announcements included three joint offerings with integrators around SAP HANA, SAP-related data warehousing and memory announcements, and a hyper-converged sofolution r SAP Business suite applications stemming from their partnership with Nutanix.
The program is designed to support a select channel deliver an ‘OpenStack Cloud-in-a-Box’ that is simple both for customers to use and partners to sell and install.
The new nodes equip VxRack to support OpenStack, and by next year, will support Hadoop and the VMware Photon Platform as well. They also have the effect of being able to turn Pivotal Cloud Foundry into an end-to-end solution for developers.
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.
The HPE ProLiant Easy Connect Managed Hybrid solution is a subscription based offering for small businesses and ROBO environments. But while American partners get access to it in a couple weeks, Canadian ones will have to wait a while – like until Q4.
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.
Stratoscale, which emphasizes its ability to deliver cloud economics to the data centre – rather than the hyperconverged nature of its technology – also made the formal announcement of its PartnerFirst Program for its channel, which is its sole route to market.
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.
