In this episode of the 10 on Tech podcast, James Green from ActualTechMedia interviews Andrew Sullivan and Brendan Wolfe of NetApp. They discuss why enterprise technology vendors invest in open source projects for the benefit of their customers, how strategic commitment from vendors to certain open source projects gives customers a sense of security, and NetApp’s “Trident” storage provisioner for Kubernetes.
Cisco Live 2017, engineering awesomeness
Amy Arnold reflects on her experience at Tech Field Day and Cisco Live US, reviewing OpenGear’s new API, Paessler’s new monitoring solution, and NetApp’s FlexPod SF.
NetApp: Old Dogs Learning New Tricks
After attending their Tech Field Day presentation, Jon Hildebrand reviews the transformation of NetApp saying, “the goal is easier accessibility by those that aren’t traditionally data center specific personnel. I really believe that NetApp is on the right path in being able to do so.”
What I’m Looking Forward to at Cisco Live 2017
Scott McDermott is in Vegas and ready to take on Cisco Live. In this post, he shares what he’s looking forward to at the event. This includes a trio of Tech Field Day Extra presentations from Paessler, OpenGear, and NetApp.
Storage is Getting Cloudier!
Stephen Foskett shares his thoughts on the increasing cloudification of storage. He highlights NetApp’s move into Microsoft’s Azure cloud as a prime example. It’s all part of what Stephen calls the “Year of Cloud Extension”!
The Year of Cloud Extension
The idea of incorporating cloud storage into the data center has been around for a while. But Stephen Foskett thinks we’re seeing philosophically different approaches to it recently, with many companies embracing the premise of data non-locality. Stephen sees this change in the assumption from data being tied to a data center to the cloud as a transformative shift allowing for true data center transformation.
NetApp Doesn’t Want You To Be Special (This Is A Good Thing)
At Storage Field Day, NetApp’s Andy Banta spoke about the death of the specialized admin in enterprise IT. As infrastructures become automated and easier to managed, and as hardware shifts increasingly toward commodity, there becomes less of a need for these admins in an organization. Dan found it a fascinating discussion, in that it showed some of that context and consequences of the new technical solutions generally presented at Tech Field Day events.
The Purity of Hyperconverged Infrastructure: What’s in a Name?
Scott Lowe isn’t too high on the term Hyperconverged Infrastructure. For Scott, it’s basically a catch all for some combination of storage and compute in a single appliance. But increasingly, though HCI broadly offers simplicity, it can fail to meet the specific needs of an organization. Scott looks at solutions from Datrium, Dell EMC ScaleIO, and NetApp that all could be categorized as HCI, but take a fundamentally different approach.
Storage Field Day Is Almost Here
It’s always fun to see delegate’s perspective before and after an event. Brandon Graves went to his first Storage Field Day last week. He definitely seemed enthusiastic in this piece previewing the event. Looking forward to see what he took away.
Why Do Technology Vendors Invest In Open Source?
James Green looks at the motivations behind companies investing in open source projects. NetApp has made major strides in this over the past 18-months, and presented extensively on it at Tech Field Day.
NetApp is Taking Point with Trident
At Tech Field Day this month, NetApp talked about their initiatives in open source and DevOps. Matt Crape was impressed with what he heard. Their Trident project gives developers resources to provision storage without having to go through a storage administrator. What makes this practical from an operations side is that the admins can preset quotas and storage limits to make sure their developers aren’t going overboard. Matt thinks its impressive the way NetApp is adapting their company to take advantage of a new IT landscape.
NetApp and Open Source
NetApp and open source isn’t an association that immediately springs to mind. Rich Stroffolino wrote up a piece giving an overview of why that’s about to change. The company has actively engaged with the open source community over the past 18 months, centered around their developer site, thePub. Their efforts originally started back in 2011 around OpenStack, and now they have made significant contributions to the Cinder and Manila projects as well.
#TFD14 Recap – NetApp Open Ecosystem
Pietro Piutti looks at what NetApp presented at Tech Field Day. The presentation focused squarely on the company’s open source initiatives. These open source projects are organized around what NetApp is calling The Pub. Pietro sees this move to open source as beneficial to everyone. Code that NetApp is contributing toward Kubernetes or Docker is accessible to anyone, and NetApp benefits by making storage more easily consumed and customized for specific uses by developers.
Tech Field Day 14 Primer: NetApp
Matt Crape finishes off his preview posts for Tech Field Day this week with NetApp. He’s been impressed how the company has adapted, both with their successful integration of Solidfire, as well as their embrace of DevOps culture. The latter is especially important, as it’s enabled the companies offerings to be automated in code, gather than manually managed via a clunky GUI. Matt can’t wait to see what the company is working on next.
The Future of On-Prem in a Cloud World
Rich Stroffolino shared an interview from ZDNet, considering what the roll of the cloud would be in the data center. Rich found it part of an interesting trend in the enterprise, seeing cloud computing as less of a zero-sum game with on-prem, and more of a spectrum. In the interview, Michael Howard and Monty Widenius both actually predict a move back to on-prem infrastructure, as cost and performance are better presented vs the seeming ease of the cloud. It’s an interesting debate, we’ll see how the winds of change impact the role of the public cloud going forward.
Netapp – an #SFD12 Update
When a company with NetApp’s extensive history and portfolio presents at Storage Field Day, sometimes you don’t know what to expect. Matt Leib certainly found a lot to like from their presentation earlier this month. He got a glimpse into how the company is proceeding in light of the SolidFire acquisition, and remained impressed by their approach. The company has managed to integrate the company without quashing its consistent innovation, always a challenge for a large company like NetApp. Matt saw this innovative spirit actually flowing back into some of NetApp’s new and updated solutions.
Storage Field Day 12 – Day 2 Recap
Adam Bergh went to first first Storage Field Day this month. In this post, he gives some of his thoughts from day two of the event. He heard presentations from Nimble Storage, NetApp, and Datera.
NetApp’s Dave Hitz on the Cloud
Rich Stroffolino wrote up his thoughts on NetApp founder Dave Hitz’s talk about how the could has impacted enterprise IT in general, and how NetApp has responded. It was a fairly honest appraisal, with Dave admitting the company’s position two years ago was not completely competitive within their market. Overall, he found the cloud is not a zero-sum game, and that even on-prem solution could stand to a little “cloudification”.
Can NetApp do it a bit better?
At Storage Field Day earlier this month, the delegates saw a presentation at NetApp. Chin-Fah Heoh wrote up his thoughts. For him, the highlight was hearing from company founder Dave Hitz, who spoke both during the presentation, and at a follow up lunch. He also liked what he saw from CloudSync, which he thought provided an interesting service for going between on-premise and AWS cloud. Make sure to check out the entire piece for Chin-Fah’s complete thoughts on the presentation.
NetApp Aren’t Just a Pretty FAS
Aside from some prime seating for the presentation, Dan Frith really enjoyed what he saw from NetApp’s Storage Field Day presentation last week. He was particularly impressed by their Cloud Control for Office 365, which is targeted for people who’ve done a migration over to Microsoft’s SaaS platform, but haven’t done anything to protect or retain that info. He’s also looking forward to digging into their Data Fabric solution, which he got an overview of during the event.
