Diamanti today launched its first channel program as part of an effort to take advantage of increased demand for deploying containers running on a bare-metal hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI).
Most containers today are deployed on top of hypervisors or a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment largely because most organization don’t have the tools required to manage containers natively on a bare-metal platform. Diamanti is moving to make it simpler to achieve that goal via a series of HCI servers designed from the ground up to deploy containers on a bare-metal platform that doesn’t require a hypervisor from, for example, VMware to be installed, says Wallie Leung, head of pre-sales systems engineering at Diamanti.
“Containers running on virtual machines are not very efficient,” says Leung.
There’s no doubt many organizations that have virtual machines installed will continue to deploy containers on them as the path of least resistance. But when it comes to production environments it’s now only a matter of time before organizations look to deploy containers on bare-metal servers to reduce the number of guest operating systems they need to support as well as eliminate the cost of licensing commercial hypervisor software, says Leung.
The Diamanti channel program seeks to provide solution providers with certifications, not-for-resale discounted units, SPIFFs, and a deal registration program tied to rebates. Partners will also be provided with technical training, sales materials, and marketing content. Like most channel program, partners participating in higher tiers of the Diamanti program will be rewarded with greater sales support and co-marketing programs.
Diamanti today also published the results of a survey of solution providers that finds 43 percent of the channel partners are already working with Docker, and nearly a third (31%) say they are working with Kubernetes container orchestrations software. Half those respondents (50%) said container adoption is being driven by end customers. In fact, the survey finds 27 percent of respondents say containers represent a significant opportunity now or within the next six months. Another 36 percent said containers represent a significant opportunity within the next 12 months.
Containers represent a new way to build software based on a microservices architecture that is being widely employed by organizations that embraced DevOps processes for building and deploying applications. As more of those applications move into production environments, Diamanti is betting it’s now only a matter of time before organizations shift to bare-metal servers optimized for containers rather than legacy hypervisors.
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