Steve Wexler

The channel as we know it will not exist in as few as five years, says Peter Sandiford, CEO of LPI Level Platforms, a managed services platform vendor based in Ottawa, Canada. While technology will continue to increase in complexity, product margins will continue to erode and most professional services will be provided remotely from […]

With so many others like IBM and HP reaching out helping hands to Oracle partners in the wake of its ongoing acquisition spree—five already this year, including Sun Microsystems—it seems only fair that Oracle respond with something more channel-friendly than the decision to take Sun’s top 4,000 customers direct. The Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) has announced […]

In what could be considered unusual timing, Eden Prairie, Minn.-based Compellent Technologies has announced zNAS, which consolidates file and block-level storage on a single platform based on the ZFS file system. The timing is interesting because zNAS won’t ship until the end of June, and the company, which is 100 percent channel, is holding its […]

Nimbus Data Systems (www.nimbusdata.com) has unveiled its vision—Sustainable Storage—and architecture—S-class—for enterprise network storage that is believed to be the first all-solid-state-drive-based (SSD) solution for the same price as enterprise-class hard disks. The price/performance claims are impressive, but analysts caution that the claims remain to be substantiated in the real world. "This is clearly a stand-alone […]

Regardless of what’s happening with the economy, the amount of data to be stored is still growing at more than 50 percent per year, and the length of time that data must be retained is being extended, too. This means it’s a very good time to be among the vendors—EMC, IBM, HP and NetApp—selling storage […]

The world is digging its way out of Iceland’s volcanic ash, but the costs are expected to run into the billions of dollars, with the airline industry already out $1.7 billion after the cancellation of more than 100,000 flights since last week. As VAR Dave Sobel, founder and CEO of Evolve Technologies, notes in his […]

With analysts putting data growth in the range of 50 percent or more per year, storing duplicated data is just adding insult to injury. According to one source, duplication rates run as high as 30 percent or more among companies that don’t have the appropriate policies and tools in place. This might help explain why […]

Whos Who in Data Dedupe Accounting for less a quarter of the sales of the small but mushrooming data deduplication market, the channel has a significant opportunity to carve out a piece of this segment. Channel Insider takes a closer look at who’s who in data dedupe, and their most recent product and/or channel announcements. […]

Those entrenched in the managed services market could have viewed Microsoft’s announcement this week of the Microsoft Windows Intune hosted managed service as a competitive threat that could disrupt the growing market for managed services. But instead, those contacted by Channel Insider said they are enthusiastic about the Microsoft Windows Intune offering. Microsoft is piloting […]

IBM, which continues to evolve from its hardware roots to selling primarily software and services, is refreshing a number of its storage products and is counting on the channel to account for a bigger slice of its revenues. As this week’s monster performance in storage earnings indicate, Big Blue is still one of the dominant […]

A privately held company based in Eden Prairie, Minn., Xiotech wants to solve the growing application/storage conflict with what it calls the market’s first and only solution for intelligent application storage. Originally spun off from Seagate, the company believes that storage vendors focusing on adding management software—i.e., Dell, EMC, HDS, HP, IBM and NetApp—don’t understand […]

Hybrid cloud-based storage and data protection vendor CTERA Networks is reaching out to service providers, including MSPs and resellers, with a cloud platform that is a turnkey solution for delivering cloud-based storage and data protection services, from creating service plans to remote maintenance of appliances, including the CloudPlug and C200. Available immediately in SaaS and […]