Several other significant intelligent storage announcements were also made, including a new Workload Planner utility for InfoSight, new Docker and Kubernetes support for HPE Cloud Volumes, the extension of Peer Persistence from HPE 3PAR to HPE Nimble – and the introduction of HPE Memory-Driven Flash, first for 3PAR, and for Nimble next year.
The big announcement is that the composable capabilities of HPE Synergy has now been extended to rack server environments, but there are several other related goodies, including the expansion of the InfoSight predictive analytics from HPE Nimble beyond storage to all of the infrastructure.
Commvault is making several extremely significant strategic partnership announcements at their GO event. The one with HPE extends an existing relationship, so in terms of new business, may not be as significant in terms of new revenues, but it is still important as clear statement of their go-to-market strategy.
In addition to completing the full integration of the analytics capabilities HPE acquired last year with Nimble, HPE also expanded their tools and integrations to automate 3PAR in the cloud, DevOps, virtualization and container environments.
Veeam has been promoted to HPE’s top partner category, Global Supply Chain, and named a Gold Partner in the HPE Global Partner Program and an HPE Pointnext storage partner. The latter allows them to be sold as an HPE consumption service, which Veeam sees as having great potential for them.
The new HPE CEO used his introductory keynote as HPE’s top exec to articulate a vision of the future where HPE will deliver next-generation technologies to customers today – a process which has already begun and where product is available today.
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.
The new Nimble arrays are also fully enabled for SCM and NVMe for when HPE supports them on these models, but the support is not yet there out of the gate.
The expansion of Commvault go-to-market abilities with HPE comes on the heels of the expansion of theirInfinidat technology integration into a go-to-market relationship, and last year’s similar agreement with Cisco.
In addition to new SMB-focused server, storage, networking and hyper-converged product, HPE has brought their Consume IT OPEX pricing model from the enterprise to SMBs as well.
The M-Series family OEMed from Mellanox, which provide 100 GbE Ethernet connectivity, but also scale down to an SMB price point, provide HPE with a strong channel offering that has a large price-performance differential over Fibre Channel.
Bringing Nimble into the HPE fold raises many questions about how the integration will work. HPE Nimble gives an update on what has happened so far, and where it’s headed.
In contrast with Aruba, where the program was deliberately kept separate from HPE Partner Ready, the plan with the many new acquisitions is to bring everything together quickly as part of an integrated strategy.
HPE also announces a replacement for its mid-range 3PAR 8450 all-flash array, a Nimble secondary flash array and both new and enhanced storage software.
ZeroStack is looking to put its Intelligent Cloud Platform at the centre of the cloud universe, and is actively partnering with other vendors to make it happen.
HPE will also incorporate Nimble’s well-regarded InfoSight Predictive Analytics platform across its entire storage portfolio.
Nimble Cloud Volumes adapts Nimble’s technology so it can be delivered as a service, which the company believes will significantly expand their total addressable market.
Lenovo’s increased emphasis over the last year on elements in the server space that go well beyond 1P and 2P servers is leading to some significant programmatic changes coming in 2017.
For Nimble, the Lenovo partnership massively expands their route to market, with a series of new appliances that combine the two companies’ technology, and which will go to market through Lenovo and its channel.
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.
