For channel partners, the immediate plus here is a massively dense NVMe device, which can be sold on the basis of those capacity and power features, even if a customer doesn’t need the devices’ computational storage capabilities today.
VAST Data is targeting larger enterprises with an unabashed rip-and replace offering, designed to replace legacy data centre infrastructure with what they term a revolutionary and state of the art offering designed to deal with modern enterprise pain points.
Support for RDMA over Converged Ethernet is available now in Purity 5.2 software, while the ObjectEngine flash-to-flash-to-cloud data protection acquired from StorReduce will hit GA in the first half of the year.
The first Western Digital offering for this space is the Ultrastar DC ME200 Memory Extension Drive, which augments physical DRAM with between 4x-8x in memory capacity. It will be available to all WD channel partners.
Axellio has only had its new product portfolio on the market for a little over a year, but has met with a strong response for their edge solutions in the performance part of the market, and just introduced a new HCI solution in partnership with Microsoft that is based on the Microsoft software-defined stack.
Violin Systems, which is focused on the high end of the performance storage market, reaches down to acquire the SME-focused storage business of X-IO Storage. The long-term goal is to fully integrate both technologies to provide high-end systems with the price-performance advantages of the X-IO technology.
Violin System introduces its first new product since it resurrected from bankruptcy, a NVMe fabric, ultra-low latency offering aimed at the extreme performance market, which is now the focus of Violin’s efforts.
The HCI part of the portfolio introduces the first NVMe offering, while new support on the CI side was announced that will support very large deployments, and a refresh of the Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Advisor’s management and orchestration software was announced.
Kevin Connolly, President of Commercial Sales at Dell EMC Canada gives his take on why the company had another strong quarter, what’s happening in the market, and where Dell EMC still has room for substantial growth in Canada.
Supermicro and Samsung will jointly promote the new server aggressively because of its specific customization for the new Samsung SSDs.
Dell also upgrades their two tower entry level workstations, with one, the Dell Precision 3630, getting a completely new chassis to make its form factor smaller.
CognoSystems does a lot of work putting together differentiated solutions for customers using next-gen emerging vendors, and the E8 technology, which uses a custom-built architecture that delivers very high performance, fits the bill there.
The IDPA series Dell EMC rolled out last year was aimed at the enterprise, but the DP4400 was specifically built for SMB and midmarket customers, and is being targeted there rather than at ROBO deployments of enterprises.
All-flash led NetApp’s climb back from the brink to profitability, and all-flash remains one of NetApp’s strategic priorities this year. However, while Joel Reich’s business unit delivers most NetApp revenue, its development priorities have transitioned to the new Cloud First approach
Just in time for SAP SAPPHIRE, several significant new SAP HANA software applications were announced, but that’s only a part of a fairly comprehensive Hitachi Vantara announcement.
The changes to the Pure channel program and go-to-market motions are extremely significant, impacting most things except for Pure’s commitment to a 100 per cent channel strategy.
The model that Pure Storage outlined as their path forward is not a net-new, as it is built on technology like last year’s FlashBlade//X and Gartner’s Shared Accelerated Storage category. It is, however, a differentiated strategy within the industry, that Pure believes will drive it to great heights.
While many customers are still on the fence about NVMe adoption in its early days, Pure Storage is making it easier for them to buy FlashArray//X now and upgrade later, by making the upgrade path simple, and changing pricing policies to encourage people to buy //X now.
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.
Dell EMC also announced that native replication has been added to EMC XtremIO, and a ew entry point X-Brick XtremIO system at up to a 55 per cent lower cost than the previous generation.
