Storage


DATACORE’S NEXT-GENERATION STORAGE STRATEGY


Datacore has been part of the enterprise storage landscape for more than two decades, but the company is entering a new phase that matters directly to the UK channel. Senior Director of Product Management, Said Boukhizou, has spent 25 years inside the business, working across Europe with customers in banking, manufacturing, research, media and the public sector. His view of the market is formed from years of experience in the field, and he offers a clear picture of where Datacore is heading and why.


D


atacore is entering a new phase, bringing its expanded portfolio together under a single platform designed to give customers freedom of choice amid rising costs,


hardware shortages, and major changes in virtualisation strategy. Tis is a company that has grown from a single product into


a multi-specialist portfolio. It has absorbed several acquisitions, unified engineering teams and rebuilt its operating model. Te next step is a consolidated platform designed to give partners and customers freedom of choice at a time when the market is being reshaped by cost pressures, supply shortages and the fallout from Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware. Datacore wants to remove lock-in, simplify operations and


give customers a way to evolve their storage strategy without rebuilding everything from scratch. For the UK channel, which is dealing with customers caught between rising costs and rising data volumes, this matters. Boukhizou spends most of his time with customers, and the


challenges he sees are consistent across Europe. Te first is the disruption caused by Broadcom’s takeover of VMware. Many organisations are reassessing their hypervisor strategy, and some are actively planning an exit. Te second is hardware availability. Lead times of 20 weeks or more are now common, and prices can change every fortnight. Public sector procurement cycles cannot keep pace with that. Te third is resiliency. Cyber-attacks are increasing, regulations are tightening, and organisations are struggling to keep data both secure and compliant. Alongside these pressures is the explosion of AI workloads.


Boukhizou describes customers planning for hundreds of petabytes on day one, with long-term targets in the exabyte range. Te industry cannot produce storage fast enough, and the power and cooling demands of AI training are creating new constraints. Data growth is outpacing both budgets and facilities. Tis is the environment Datacore is building for. Te company’s


long-standing position in storage virtualisation gives it a foundation, but the future depends on flexibility. Boukhizou’s view is that customers need freedom to choose hardware, hypervisors and deployment models without being locked into a single vendor’s ecosystem.


38 | September/October 2026


Freedom to choose Datacore’s core value remains the same as it was in the early 2000s: storage virtualisation that works across any hardware and any hypervisor. Customers can run Datacore on Dell, Lenovo, IBM, Fujitsu or


refurbished servers. Tey can use VMware, Hyper-V, Proxmox, XCP-ng or KVM. Tey can mix brands and generations. Tey can migrate VMs between hypervisors using Datacore’s built-in conversion tools. Tey can be deployed at the core, at the edge, or in the cloud. Tey can choose block, file, or object, and they can automatically move data between tiers based on policy. Tis flexibility is increasingly important for UK channel


partners who need to help customers navigate the VMware transition. Boukhizou notes that Proxmox usage has risen sharply, and many organisations are exploring mixed environments where some workloads move to containers while others remain virtualised. Datacore supports Kubernetes and KubeVirt, allowing VMs and containers to coexist on a single storage layer. Te company also avoids encapsulating data. Everything


remains accessible through standard protocols, and customers can leave Datacore without losing access to their data.


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