Twelve years ago, NetApp acquired scale-out NAS startup Spinnaker, and began a long and horrific series of integration problems. This year, they acquired SolidFire’s scale-out technology, and took steps to learn from the lessons of the past.
The growing flash businesses, strong partner services opportunities, and better leveraging of Arrow and Avnet have helped drive NetApp’s Canadian business in 2016.
Over the last year, NetApp has reshaped its channel strategy extensively, and will soon cap it with a new Hard Deck policy. Unlike a similar named policy of an old competitor, NetApp thinks this one will be highly popular with partners.
Mark Bregman, NetApp’s CTO, sits down for a detailed talk about NetApp’s technology strategy going forward, and why the company is convinced it has made the difficult transition from a vendor of yesterday to a vendor of tomorrow.
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.
NetApp announces multiple new releases in its data protection software, including some which leverage new capabilities of the just-released ONTAP 9 OS.
NetApp has also strengthened, and is now giving much greater emphasis to, its flash-focused 3-4-5 guarantee to customers.
New, preconfigured NetApp bundles for enterprise Splunk deployments will now also be available through Arrow, which is expected to significantly increase the amount of EF-series all-flash arrays sold in particular, as well as E-series arrays.
At a customer event in Toronto on Wednesday, NetApp CEO George Kurian laid out the company’s case to key customers and partners why the storage pioneer is well positioned for the new age of IT.
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.
New wizards and additional recovery options are also aimed at helping partners sell Arcserve UDP to larger customers than before.
With the new Avnet Knowledge Network, the distributor is aiming to bring all of its support and training offerings under the same roof.
Permabit’s deal with Arrow to bring its data efficiency appliance designed to let the older OEMs compete with the new hyperscale vendors makes IBM the third vendor to bring this technology on board, following EMC and NetApp last fall.
Infinio is announcing a partner program, looking to sign up and support a significant number of partners to sell an innovative software-based I/O optimization solution.
Improved automation of Microsoft’s DFS global namespace management capability highlights this release.
Permabit’s SANblox appliance is the software vendor’s first hardware product, requested by the big storage OEMs to help them fend off competition from the new hyperscale vendors.
A3Cube uses enhanced PCIe architecture to provide in-memory direct acceleration to existing applications, is compatible with the big storage OEMs rather than competitive with them. and goes to market entirely through channel partners.
Sanovi, an Indian-based maker of disaster recovery software, launches a partner program to deepen its penetration of the North American market.
Cisco announces new partners for its Intercloud effort and assigns channel chief Edison Peres to lead its cloud channel charge.
