Systems Channel News Roundup for the week of Dec. 13-17, 2010.
Egenera hopes to boost channel sales
Egenera, which started out touting turnkey data centre
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hardware and software bundles, is building out a partner programme to push its management software. Qualifying partners will get training and support by selling Egenera's PAN Manager infrastructure management software that layers over the switching, storage, and server hardware best suited to the customer's needs.
"What we offer is similar to what [VCE Vblock] does, but we let you choose the blades, networking and storage," said Ken Oestreich, Egenera's vice president of product marketing. "Instead of taking value from the channel with pre-integrated stacks, we let the channel handle the integration." The Virtual Computing Environment's Vblocks sport preconfigured hardware paired with VMware virtualisation software.
Citrix looks to ride XenClient update to boost VDI sales
Citrix will use the next version of its XenClient to improve the company's Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) offering.
Citrix claims its XenDesktop 5.0 is simpler to use for IT administrators and supports offline HDX protocol improvements. Customers needed XenClient 1.0 to take advantage of offline capabilities but they had to install it on end-user PCs, according to SearchVirtualDesktop.com.
VDI experts say that Citrix will release a new version of XenClient in Q1 2011 with an updated XenClient Hardware Compatibility List, but does not plan to amend the end-user installation requirements.
Vblock and FlexPod compete for channel
Solution providers looking for pre-integrated infrastructure stacks for virtualisation requirements have two choices in Vblock and FlexPod.
Both stacks rely on the VMware hypervisor and Cisco UCS blades. The difference between the two is in the storage vendors: Vblock requires EMC storage and FlexPod uses NetApp, according to SearchServerVirtualization.com.
Solution providers should also be aware of Vblock's reputation as a rigid, but more polished, product. FlexPod is a less of a pre-assembled stack and more of a reference architecture assembled by channel partners.
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