Nutanix announces the NX8150 hyper-converged appliance and Cloud Connect, a new software capability allowing hybrid cloud architectures that leverage popular public cloud services.

The NX-8150 is a hyper-converged appliance engineered for applications demanding high storage capacity, low latency and fast storage performance. According to the company a single appliance supports up to 3500 Exchange mailboxes in 2U of space, with flexible CPU, flash and networking configurations allowing the delivery of any application at any scale.

Inside are 20 or 24 cores from dual Ivy Bridge CPUs. x4 SSDs (400GB, 800GB, 1.6TB) for a maximum of 6.4TB and x20 1TB HDDs.

VMware expands its VMware Service Provider Program (VSPP) with the VMware vCloud Air Network, a network of VMware-based cloud services with over 3800 partners based in around 100 countries.

Through the vCloud Air Network customers get a partner badging system to identify and select from vCloud Air of vCloud Air Network Service Providers. Service providers will have different designations, with "IaaS Powered" providers being those with vSphere-based clouds and "Hybrid Cloud Powered" partners being those using vCloud Director.

"Horizon DaaS Powered" partners are those with clouds handling desktop-as-a-service deployments. VMware will also offer further badge validations based on future vCloud Air services.

Silver Peak announces Unity, an intelligent wide area network (WAN) fabric designed to unify enterprise networks with public clouds via intelligent  routing providing a secure, optimal path for SaaS and IaaS traffic.

Thus, according to the company admins gain the ability to monitor and control connectivity to the cloud while ensuring consistent SaaS performance.

The Unity fabric consists of a network overlay handling connectivity to any combination of enterprise services, IaaS resources and SaaS applications. Silver Peak instances on the Unity fabric communicate with the Silver Peak Cloud Intelligence service to provide information on cloud providers and internet "weather", while Unity dynamically routes traffic to the cloud over an optimal path.

Enterprise storage vendor NetApp strikes a pair of relationships in the name of the cloud-- one with Microsoft for NetApp Private Storage (NPS), and an expanded cloud partnership with data centre maker Equinix.

As the company puts it NPS enables customers to extend their infrastructure to the Azure public cloud in order to create "a seamless hybrid cloud environment." It handles storage for enterprise workloads such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle and SAP, with NetApp taking care of data control while Azure provides compute resource for peak, unforecasted or seasonal workloads.

Data control comes through SnapLock data permanence functionality and NetApp disk encryption, and a secure, high-speed Azure ExpressRoute connection bridges NetApp and Azure resources together.