Pete McNair has been appointed channel chief of NetApp Canada.
The former national account director for Equinix Canada officially has the title of Canadian Alliances and Channel Sales Director for NetApp and he replaces out-going channel chief Rick Brown who is now at Palo Alto Networks Canada.
Besides Equinix, McNair was also the national sales director at value-added distributor Avnet Canada. He started his career in the channel at IBM Canada as a business unit director.
The McNair appointment comes at a time when all-flash array pricing is dropping. The marketplace and the channel have, however, recognized that flash provides management benefits in a converged infrastructure solution environment. NetApp and its alliance vendor partner Cisco Systems have the FlexPod converged infrastructure solution going through the channel.
FlexPod with All-Flash FAS has made some in-road in the data centre.
“As more enterprises deploy and become comfortable with flash, the need for scalable, flash-optimized platforms with a rich set of mature data services will become a key purchase criteria in enterprise storage,” said Eric Burgener, research director of Storage, IDC. “Enterprises looking to reap the TCO benefits of flash deployment at scale for their primary workloads need to know these solutions can reliably handle dense mixed-workload consolidation. Vendors like NetApp, with a strong portfolio of highly flash-optimized platforms, give buyers the choices they need to meet those requirements.”
NetApp has also introduced the FlexPod Advantage initiative along with Cisco to help channel partners and customers accelerate the journey to a modern data centre. The featured solution is the FlexPod with NetApp All Flash FAS storage, Cisco UCS servers with the latest M4 processors and Cisco NEXUS 9K switches with Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI). This solution is being targeted for organizations working to consolidate mixed workloads and protocols across flash, disk and cloud resources.