Channel Beat: Lenovo Unveils OEM Partnership With DataCore; Storage Outage Hits Microsoft Azure; Procera Networks Hires Tom Carter

This week, Lenovo took steps to reinforce its software-defined storage strategy by unveiling a new O-E-M agreement with DataCore Software, through which it will integrate DataCore's SANsymphony software-defined storage with Lenovo servers. The deal comes as Lenovo prepares for the end of its data center storage technology partnership with Nimble Storage, which is in the midst of being acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Lenovo recently lost its partnership with SimpliVity after the hyper-convergence upstart was also acquired by HPE in February. Solution providers said Lenovo needs to beef up its long-term storage strategy to go deeper into the data center. Solution providers said "Storage availability" issues affecting Microsoft's Azure public cloud for over 8 hours this week are once again spotlighting the benefits of private and hybrid cloud. Microsoft said its engineering team identified a "storage cluster that lost power and became unavailable" as the preliminary cause of the storage issues which affected the Eastern United States. The Azure outage, which affected storage availability from 5:50 p.m. EDT on March 15 to 2:00 a.m. on March 16, comes about two weeks after Amazon Web Services' public cloud storage service was hit by a four-hour outage that disrupted service to several high-profile websites. Procera Networks has hired former F5 Networks sales leader Tom Carter as the new senior vice president of global sales and services for the telecom software provider. Carter will be responsible for extending Procera's virtualization and cloud offerings on a global scale, as well as driving the vendor's overall sales objectives. In a statement, Carter said that there’s “no doubt that Procera is leading in the virtualization space…” He also mentioned that he is “looking forward” to being a key part of Procera, and continuing to drive growth in 2017 and beyond.