Photo gallery: Channel celebrates at NetApp ANZ Partner Awards

Comstor, Intalock, Telstra, Katana 1 and Diversus Group are among the winners in this year's NetApp Australia and New Zealand Partner Awards, held last week in Sydney.

The second annual awards saw Telstra's 'outstanding' data fabric-as-a-service and 'unique' on-demand and modular capabilities, help garner the company the award for Service Provider of the Year - one of two Telstra picked up on the night, with the telco also taking out the award for marketing excellence.

Intalock took home the award for New Partner of the Year, thanks to its 'impressive' first half revenue growth and work to support NetApp by introducing new growth segments in specialist verticals, while strong revenue and flash portfolio growth and levels of success in analytics and big data solutions netted Katana 1 the Platinum Reseller of the Year award.

Diversus Group took out Gold Reseller of the Year thanks to its revenue achievements, new business wins and support for NetApp's sales teams 'through cooperation and teamwork'.

Comstor's development of a one source single SKU for FlexPod saw the distributor take out the award for Converged Infrastructure Excellence award.

ASE IT won Outstanding Cloud Initiative for its commitment to excellence by building a self-funded storage GRID as-a-service solution alongside a NetApp Private Storage solultion next to Amazon Web Services, providing choice models for object stores in a pure cloud model, NetApp says.

Four individual awards were also presented, with Filip Zahrahdnik of Virtual Machine Technology recognised for Technical Excellence and Data#3's Sarah Edwards recognised for Sales Excellence.

Equinix' Glen Hastings was named Alliance Partner Champion, while Shane Ferris from Arrow won the inaugural Hall of Fame award as recognition 'for his dedication to stay at the top of his technical craft and provision of round the clock service to NetApp's partners which has been without peer'.