Dell Strikes Reseller Deal with Atos; Supplants SGI
Dell EMC and Atos announced a reseller deal today in which Dell will offer Atos’ high-end 8- and 16-socket Bullion servers. Some move from Dell had been expected following Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s purchase of SGI late last year. Dell had a similar reseller deal with SGI (SGI UV 300H) dating back to July 2015. Data analytics, of course, is an increasingly important workflow and market segment in enterprise and HPC environments.
In making the announcement, the parties noted that the “Bullion servers are certified by SAP and Oracle and complete Dell EMC’s existing portfolio of high-end advanced PowerEdge servers. Both companies will work closely together on sales and marketing activities to offer high-performance solutions in the field of big data and the Internet of Things, development of private clouds and SAP HANA solutions. The Bullion reseller agreement is a new step in the ongoing collaboration between the two companies.”
Commenting on the deal, Steve Conway, SVP of Research and HPDA Lead Analyst, Hyperion Research (formerly IDC HPC research) said, “Following HPE’s acquisition of SGI, it was inevitable that Dell would cease promoting the SGI UV as Dell’s high-end platform for SAP HANA. It’s not surprising that Dell-EMC is now casting the Atos Bullion servers in that role, because these are also very competitive high-end HANA platforms. I assume that SGI provided most of the support for SGI UV systems sold by Dell, so those customers shouldn’t be affected by this transition.”
Dell and Atos took direct aim at competitive offerings by positioning the Bullion line as “a technological alternative at lower cost for Sparc and HP-UX systems.”
Atos says Bullion servers are used by over 100 million end-users worldwide, “mainly in Europe, North America, Africa and Brazil.” The deal may offer Atos new increased leverage in the U.S. market. The Bullion line supports up to 24 TB of memory and is highly scalable. Atos also touts TCO reduction for “large data lakes and virtualized clusters reaching up to 35 percent on database consolidation projects.”
Dell’s Ravi Pendekanti, SVP, Server Solutions, is quoted in the release, “Over the last few years, Dell EMC and Atos have been working together to combine Bullion servers and Dell EMC unified storage solutions to provide our customers with a leading solution for deployment of mission-critical SAP HANA projects. Dell EMC will now be able to resell 8 to 16 sockets Bullion servers, Atos’ leading high-end server platform which is ranked as one of the most powerful in the market. The inclusion of Bullion complements Dell’s portfolio of industry leading PowerEdge servers to host the most critical workloads with outstanding performance, reliability and scalability.”
Availability starts today. Link to the press release: https://atos.net/en/2017/press-release/general-press-releases_2017_08_22/atos-forms-global-reseller-alliance-with-dell-with-8-to-16-sockets-bullion-servers
