Hammer To Distribute StarWind

Hammer plc, VAD for over 25 years, announced the addition of StarWind‘s simplified software-defined storage stack, hyperconverged and storage appliances to its portfolio, in a distribution agreement for the SMB, ROBO, and low- to mid-tier of the enterprise market.

The partnership is EMEA-wide, and Hammer is the exclusive StarWind distributor in the UK, Ireland, Germany, Benelux, Nordics and Italy.

StarWind is a one-stop shop for full-stack virtualisation infrastructure, providing all the solutions required for a true software-defined datacentre for primary and backup purposes. Optimised for Hyper-V, StarWind appliances are also VMware compatible and offer an effective way to enable customers to move away from traditional architecture to a hyperconverged system.

Benefits include pre-integrated Veeam Software, Inc.‘s licences as standard on all products, to enable straightforward, asynchronous backup and replication; a cloud-out option to give customers the ability to offload ‘cold’ data to the public cloud with ease by utilising service providers such as Amazon S3; and a free-of-charge migration service.

A fit for 5-30TB useable capacity, these cost-effective systems are architected to be easy to deploy, while delivering performance and redundancy in as little as a two-node hyperconverged cluster. The appliances can be scaled up and out by adding drives or storage units or additional nodes for expanding compute power, creating a fit for ROBOs, SMBs, and hosted service providers.

Gerard Marlow, GM for OEM and whitebox storage, Hammer, said: “This relationship will allow us to provide additional, complementary products to our existing customers, but will also give us the ability to engage with new resellers in the SMB and ROBO hyperconverged space that our portfolio has not enabled us to reach in the past.“

“We are thrilled to be partnering with StarWind, and look forward to a mutually beneficial partnership – one which allows Hammer to make its name as a leader in delivering hyper-convergence to the SMB/ROBO segment of the market.“

Artem Berman, COO and co-founder, StarWind, said: “StarWind and Hammer stood together at the origins of virtualisation and possess necessary resources for anticipating and forming market demand. Hammer has 25 years of experience in storage, servers and end-to-end solutions in the market and StarWind has experience in IT infrastructure virtualisation, storage and turnkey solutions, and has been named as Cool Vendor for Compute Platforms 2016 by Gartner. By joining our technologies, experience and partner network, we can offer the market a product with an extremely high ‘price-value’ ratio through the network of partners in the area of virtualisation and storage systems.“

Marlow continued: “Hammer has been invested in the enterprise hyperconverged space for a number of years, and we have recognised an additional need to address the SMB/ROBO space. I’m proud to say that the culmination of that work is Hammer taking hyperconverged technology dedicated to the SMB market for the first time.“

StarWind is also available as a software-only option.