VMware, Nutanix Or Red Hat: Optionality A Win For Storage Customers, Redesign Group CEO Says
‘We still see value in what VMware is doing. We still see value in the VCF portfolio. Our customers are still investing there. We’re investing there, but we’re also investing in Nutanix. We’re also investing in Microsoft. We’re also investing in Red Hat,’ says Phil Sanginario, CEO of The Redesign Group, Dell’s North American Storage Partner of the Year.
The Redesign Group CEO Phil Sanginario said the wealth of hypervisor options emerging in the market is a huge win for modern customers who want a technology partner that can look at their IT needs holistically, not just through the lens of a single vendor.
“We still see value in what VMware is doing. We still see value in the VCF portfolio. Our customers are still investing there. We’re investing there, but we’re also investing in Nutanix. We’re also investing in Microsoft. We’re also investing in Red Hat,” he said during a recent interview. “And, you know, I think customers want to be able to work with a partner and with a manufacturer that can come to the table, and look at their workloads. It’s not just about the technology, it’s about the interoperability of the ecosystem.”
Sanginario is leading the El Segundo, Calif.-based solution provider on a winning streak as the company collected Dell’s North American Storage Partner of the Year in 2025 — and 2024, 2023 and 2022 — along with multiple awards from CRN.
Dell has been touting the need for partners to embrace a disaggregated infrastructure architecture, which merges on-prem, cloud and hyperconverged infrastructure to give customers a flexible stack capable of handling workloads now and into AI era.
“When you look at those platforms, they might be overconsumed on storage, underutilized on compute and vice versa,” Sanginario told CRN. “So the ability to have this disaggregated architecture gives customers the ability to scale and then the whole AI component of this. Once you start building a disaggregated private cloud, it gives you the ability to kind of burst to whatever your needs are.”
Dell unveiled several new storage products at Dell Tech World 2025 last month, including file and object storage, PowerScale F710 and PowerScale F910, which have twice the capacity they did a year ago, and include services to automate data ingestion with a proprietary RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) connector, as well as advanced search and discovery capabilities.
Meanwhile, Dell’s ObjectScale integrates with modern data lakes, AI tools and a large variety of object file extensions as it delivers an industry-leading throughput of 384 gigabytes per second.
Here is CRN’s conversation with Sanginario, which has been edited for length and clarity:
Dell announced several new storage products at Dell Tech World. Which ones are you excited to bring to customers?
So we’re really excited about the portfolio. We lead with Dell Technologies because of the portfolio story that you’re talking about. For us as a partner, we feel like what they’re communicating is a real commitment to all of the road maps on all these products.
So, for example, Powerstore. We’ve had a tremendous amount of success with Powerstore. We’ve seen that product come to life over the last five years. We do a tremendous amount of Powerstore business, as well as investment into the cyber resiliency part of the portfolio.
We’re a big data protection partner, so we’re really excited to see the advancements in the PowerProtect Data Domain, all flash, and then unstructured data solutions. Powerscale is huge.
For us, I think it’s about the commitment to the roadmap, and responding to what the market is asking for. Dell continues to deliver time and time again, and gives us no reason to want to go represent other storage.
On PowerProtect Data Domain, how important is that product moving to all flash? This is brand new this year.
Yeah, it’s huge. I think it’s like when you talk about data protection. It’s not about necessarily, just about, ‘Do you have a good backup?’ It’s about, ‘Can you restore?’ And then, ‘Are the backups in a good known state?’ Particularly in the case of the cyber recovery part of the equation.
So when we’re going in and working with customers, we want to make sure they have a really good platform for data protection. But also, ‘Do they have a cyber recovery vault?’ And, ‘Does that cyber recovery vault have the ability to restore in clean room, so that they have end to end protection?’
When you start introducing all-flash into that equation, that’s the bottleneck for the quick restores. So, the performance that we’ll be able to drive out of that in addition to the connectivity to the primary storage platforms is huge.
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We’re seeing hypervisor agnosticism across storage vendors, which is folks moving away from VMware, looking for alternatives to VMware, or better utilization of VMware. Dell obviously has this HCI offering with Nutanix. How compelling is that to your customers in the conversations that you’re having?
I think one of the things that Dell has done well for a long time — I mentioned, the portfolio aspect of their go to market — they offer choice, like the Powerflex platform, the ability for that to be hypervisor agnostic, the integrations with Nutanix.
From a Redesign standpoint, we still see value in what VMware is doing. We still see value in the VCF portfolio. Our customers are still investing there. We’re investing there, but we’re also investing in Nutanix. We’re also investing in Microsoft. We’re also investing in Red Hat.
And, you know, I think customers want to be able to work with a partner and with a manufacturer that can come to the table, and look at their workloads. It’s not just about the technology, it’s about the interoperability of the ecosystem. And so to be able to come to the table with solutions that give them flexibility and options, that’s what we need in a partner.
The market has ebbed and flowed over the last decade. It was disaggregated, and then it went all hyper converged, and now we’re coming out the other side. The reality is we had a massive install base of VxRail clients. And Dell has run the numbers. They have the macro view. The utilization on compute and storage has not been very good. When you look at those platforms, they might be over consumed on storage, underutilized on compute and vice versa.
So the ability to have this disaggregated architecture gives customers the ability to scale. And then the whole AI component of this. Once you start building a disaggregated, private cloud, it gives you the ability to kind of burst to whatever your needs are.
One of the things we’ve heard is that AI is going to follow the data and the data lives at the endpoint with the customer, and the people using it. When you look at that, how big is that storage opportunity for Redesign?
The opportunity is huge. It dominates the conversation. It’s very clear that there’s this just massive wave of innovation that’s going to come from this. And I think everybody’s trying to figure out, what does that opportunity look like? How do we capitalize on it? That’s internally that’s for our customers.
From an infrastructure standpoint, the first wave of huge investment was in the large hyperscalers. It was in the CSPs. They made billions, tens of billions of dollars of investment in the AI infrastructure. And then, what we’re seeing this past year is we had a couple of very successful large transactions with big research institutions.
We’re seeing a ton of opportunity there. Eight-figure transactions where university research is going in deep and trying to build out the capabilities. And so I think the next phase of this is enterprise. And then the question will be when does it get to midmarket? And we focus a lot on midmarket customers. We focus on SLED as well. I think it’s a tremendous tailwind for everybody, from acquiring the infrastructure to implementing the solutions.
Partner first for storage. It’s been around for going on two years now since the announcement. From your point of view, how’s it been working for Redesign?
I’m fortunate to be on the partner advisory board. So we had the opportunity to give feedback. I think Dell listens really well to their channel community, and they implement changes.
And so I think that the concept around Partner First For Storage was all about improving collaboration between the channel and the go-to-market team at Dell.
And it was like a light switch that got flipped, when they made that transition. It was a very clear signal to the ecosystem. But more importantly, internally at Dell, it was like, ‘We’re going all in on the channel, in storage.’ So, yeah, we’ve seen a ton of ton of momentum.
We had a meeting where they were kind of giving the 18-month feedback on how things are going. The first quarter, it was like, ‘OK, we’re not necessarily seeing it.’
It takes a little bit of time. Sales cycles are six to nine months, usually, I think that it sounds like the numbers are very good in terms of the momentum for Dell, and the growth in channel storage sales.