Piltoff, of Champion Solutions Group, said NetApp keeping its direct sales working with partners in the largest enterprise accounts is still very helpful to solution providers working the midmarket accounts. "The better NetApp does in larger accounts the better it is for the SMB accounts as well," he said.

Brent Collins, global practice manager for data center infrastructures at World Wide Technology, a St. Louis-based solution provider and also a NetApp channel partner, said his company is more focused on the enterprise, and not so much in the midrange, and will not see much impact from NetApp's new hard deck program.

NetApp has done a good job of partnering with solution providers in the large enterprises, and will likely continue to do so, Collins told CRN.

"NetApp has reached out to us to really understand what we're looking for," he said. "They understand their partners, and reach out to make sure they're as partner-friendly as possible. They've been flexible and easy to work with

Bill Lipsin, NetApp's vice president of worldwide channels, told CRN that his company has a separate program, "Run From EMC, Run To NetApp," aimed at helping partners move existing non-NetApp customers to NetApp.

Storage vendors view Dell's acquisition of EMC as bringing confusion to the marketplace, but that won't result in a share-shift to other vendors just for the sake of moving to another solution, Lipsin said.

"So we tried to make sure we've identified the areas that we believe will be complimentary to our partners to [help customers] move from older Dell technology, and definitely from the EMC confusion in terms of which storage products will [still be available] come February or whenever."

NetApp's new all-flash storage line and the growth of that line, combined with the company's continued momentum in FlexPod, gives customers a good place to land should they decide to look outside EMC, or if they decide to migrate off older Dell storage technology due for a technology refresh, Strubel said.

"The decisions that were made three to five years ago are not necessarily the same decision a customer would make today given that the technology that OEMs are bringing to market today is profoundly different," he said.