I’m excited that I have been invited to be a delegate at Storage Field Day 19. This is a little different than the Tech Field Day I attended in 2019, because the focus of all the presentations at this event is data storage.

I am looking forward to this because I am a storage person. My career started as a Technical Trainer at EMC, I was a storage admin for a pharma company. I went back to EMC to develop technical training, I then went to work for Dell Storage, and then Inktank (a startup that provided services and support for Ceph). I guess you could say storage is in my blood, so Storage Field Day should be lots of fun.

What to expect at Storage Field Day

Here are the companies we’ll be visiting (in the order they will be presenting), and what I’m looking forward to hearing about from them. Remember, you can join in on this event too by watching the livestream and participating in the twitter conversation using the hastag #SFD19.  You can @ me during the livestream and I can ask a question for you.

Disclosure: I am invited by GestaltIT as a delegate to their Storage Field Day 19 event from Jan 22-24, 2020 in Silicon Valley. My expenses, travel, accommodation and conference fees will be covered by GestaltIT, the organizer and I am not obligated to blog or promote the vendors’ technologies to be presented at this event. The content of this blog represents my own opinions and views.

Tiger Technology

The first presentation we hear will be from Tiger Technology. Just looking at the website, they claim to do lots of stuff. When I look at their About page, they’ve been around since 2004 “developing software and designing high-performance, secure, data management solutions for companies in Enterprise IT, Surveillance, Media and Entertainment, and SMB/SME markets”. They are headquartered in Bulgaria and Alpharetta, and since my mom was born and raised in Alpharetta, they get extra points.

Skipping to their News page, it looks like they have a new solution that tiers data in the cloud. I’m looking forward to hearing how they do that!

NetApp

NetApp talked with us at TFD20 (my blog review of that presentation). They talked to us then a bit about their flavor of Kubernetes, and the work they are doing to make it easy for their customers to have data where they want it to be. Hoping they do a deeper dive on CVS and ANF, their PaaS offerings for the current public cloud offerings.

Western Digital

Western Digital has presented at previous Tech Field Day events, and have acquired many companies who are Tech Field Day presenting alums. The last time they presented back in February 2019 they talked about NVMe, and I love that topic.

One thing I think that doesn’t get enough attention is the incredible innovation that has happened over the last several years in storage hardware. The software is now catching up, and apps will follow. So there is cool tech stuff happening on prem too, not just in the public cloud domain.

I peeped their twitter account, and they have interesting things they are showing this week at CES. Like this 8TB prototype that looks like a cell phone battery bank.  That would be a pretty sweet piece of swag! 😊

Infrascale

This will be Infrascale’s first appearance at Storage Field Day. Their website says what they do right up front: they have a DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service) solution that fails to a second site, booting from an appliance or the cloud.

After storage, the biggest time I’ve spent in my career has been with data protection and disaster recovery, so I’ll be looking forward to this presentation as well. Really looking forward to hear about how this solution can included in an architecture.

Dell EMC

Since I’ve worked in storage at Dell and EMC, and I’m just coming off a tour at VMware, of course I’m excited to sit in on presentations from my Dell Technologies federation homies! There will be presentations on Isilon and PowerOne, but the one I’m most curious about is one on DevOps.

Komprise

Komprise has presented at Storage Field Day before (in 2018). They are a data management and tiering solution. At AWS re:invent they unveiled a cloud data growth analytics solution. I hope we hear about that.

WekaIO

WekaIO’s  has presented at Tech Field Day a couple of times before. They have a distributed storage system for ML/AI, it looks like they directly access NVMe flash drives. It looks like they also have a solution on AWS. So this should be an interesting conversation. I’m just hoping we don’t have to listen to a “what is AI story” before they get to the good stuff.

Minio

This will be Minio’s first presentation at Tech Field Day. Minio sells high performance object storage. One of the other Tech Field day delegates, Chin-Fah Heoh, has already written a blog post about how Mineo is in a different class than other object storage providers. I’m really looking forward to this presentation.

This post – NetApp Goes to the Cloud – is my review of materials presented at #TFD20.

NetApp’s 1^st presentation at #TFD20 was about NetApp’s cloud strategy. I was very excited to see Nick Howell (aka @DatacenterDude), NetApp’s Global Field CTO for Cloud Data Services, there to greet us and kick things off.  I’ve always known him to be knowledgeable, visionary, and a bit controversial. All of my favorite things! And I was psyched to see how he was going to frame his conversation.

Infrastructure Admin’s Journey to the Cloud

Nicks’ presentation was titled “OK, Now What?” An Infrastructure Admin’s Journey to the cloud.

He set up the history of things for datacenter admins, and how quickly they need use their existing skills to pivot if they’re going to support cloud. I liked this slide highlighting historical design patterns for datacenters.

He gave a great overview of the struggles IT Ops folks will need to go through in order to support their organization’s move to the cloud: new training, new certs, etc. It will take effort to get up to speed from a technical perspective.

NetApp Goes to the Cloud

Of course, the message was how easy NetApp makes it for their customers to get to “the cloud” using NetApp Cloud Data Services. He brought in the Google Cloud Partner of the Year award that NetApp was awarded this year’s at Google Next. To me, that makes it obvious they are doing the hard integration work to enable hybrid cloud with NetApp storage.

They’ve been at this for a few years after hiring an exec to run a cloud business in 2017, and acquiring cloud startups (Greenqloud 2017, StackPointCloud 2018). Two years later, NetApp has built a suite of cloud products that are delivered in the cloud, as-a-Service, by NetApp.

They have an IaaS offering called CVO (Cloud Volumes ONTAP), which is a virtual version of ONTAP in the cloud which allows customers to do everything they would do with ONTAP on prem plus more in the three major public cloud services. They have a free trial if you’re interested in kicking the tires. There are also two PaaS offerings called CVS (AWS Cloud Volumes, Google Cloud Volumes) and ANF (Azure NetApp Files).

They are building a control plane, that Nick compared to vCenter, called Fabric Orchestrator. It will give a global view of all data, no matter where the data resides. You’ll have oversight and management control from this control plan. This is set to launch in 2020.

NetApp Kubernetes Service

While this is great work to provide the services to make NetApp hybrid architectures possible, what can you *do* with it? Data capacity exists to host applications, and the way to orchestrate modern applications is Kubernetes.

NetApp has their own Kubernetes service that they call NKS. It is a pure upstream Kubernetes play, and they support the latest release within a week. It has been built to provision, maintain, and do lifecycle management no mater the cloud on which it runs.

Real talk

From everything we were shown, if you’re a NetApp customer you have lots of opportunity on which cloud to use as you build a hybrid and/or multi-cloud strategy. You have a a cloud organization that understands your fears and pains, and they are working to make cloud as easy as possible for you.

NetApp seems to have the right team and attitude to make multi-cloud a reality for their customers. They’ve built a cloud team from cloud native veterans to drive this strategy. They seem to be very intent on shepherding traditional operations teams into the new cloud native era. Will this be enough to span the digital transformation gap? Only time will tell.