First things first, I’m awed by the depth of the technical expertise of the NetApp A-Team advocates and advisors. I’m incredibly honored and grateful for the opportunity to join the family. It’s a NetApp fan-girl’s dream come true! #womenintech. Being part of the NetApp A-Team comes with perks like pre-release access to announcements and briefings directly from NetApp’s own executives and experts. As if this weren’t awesome enough, we also have opportunities to engage in interactive conversations with these experts.
Recently, I participated in one of those conversations, my first NetApp A-Team briefing: “Hybrid Cloud Delivered by NetApp” with Ingo Fuchs. It was a continuation of NetApp’s Data Fabric vision/hybrid cloud message that we heard at NetApp Insight 2016. Here are the 2 two key takeaways that I got out of this briefing.
- Data Fabric subscription-based cloud services have arrived. Although NetApp has already given customers access to the Amazon cloud with EMR for analytics, with the new Cloud Sync Service, you can now use Amazon’s resources for analytics of on-premises NFS data. This model lets customers spin up additional resources as needed and it reduces the analytics processing time from hours to minutes. Another new service, Cloud Control for MS Office 365, enables backup to on-premises data center targets (FAS, ONTAP Cloud, StorageGRID, AltaVault).
- StorageGRID 10.3 is revolutionizing NetApp object storage. This latest release of SGRID is a big deal, and here are some of the highlights. It’s now integrated and distributed by NetApp with no OS installation, and you can deploy using OVF (VMware) or YAML (OpenStack). SGRID’s new built-in Policy Simulator Tool allows you to simulate policy changes to help prevent any costly or disruptive mistakes. During S3 performance tests, the PUT (writes), and GET (reads), object rate per node was 2-4 times faster than 10.2 (released about 6 months ago). And with the increased functionality of an improved GUI, you can complete tasks like decommissioning an entire data center. Pretty incredible, if you ask me.
While these two features might may not be top of the bill with in this week’s hybrid cloud launch, they’re what gets me excited about the future of NetApp. I would encourage everyone to look into what NetApp is doing around hybrid cloud today. There’s a lot to love, and if this launch is any indication, there’s a lot more coming in the future. Stay tuned.