TFD

NetApp Data Fabric: A la Hybrid Cloud! – An update from NetApp Insight 2018

Chan 2 Comments


History

For those of you who have genuinely been following NetApp as a storage company over the years, you may already know that NetApp, contrary to the popular belief as a storage company, has always been a software company at their core. Unlike most of their competitors back in the day such as EMC or even HPe, who were focused primarily on raw hardware capabilities and purpose built storage offerings specific for each use case, NetApp always had a single storage solution (FAS platform) with fit for purpose hardware. However their real strength was in the piece of software they developed on top (Data OnTAP) which offered so many different data services that often would require 2 or 3 different solutions altogether to achieve when it comes to their competition. That software driven innovation kept them punching well beyond their weight to be in the same league as their much bigger competitors.

Over the last few years however, NetApp did expand out their storage offerings to include some additional purpose built storage solutions out of necessity to address many niche customer use cases. They built the E series for raw performance use cases with minimal data services, EF for extreme all flash performance and acquired SolidFire offering which was also a very software driven, scalable storage solution built on commodity HW. The key for most of these storage solution offerings was still the software defined storage & software defined data management capabilities of each platform and the integration of all them through the software technologies such as SnapMirror and SnapVault to move data seamlessly in between these various platform.

In an increasingly software defined world (Public & Private cloud all powered primarily through software), the model of leading with software defined data storage and data management services enables many additional possibilities to expand things out beyond just these Data Center solutions for NetApp, as it turned out.

NetApp Data Fabric

NetApp Data Fabric was an extension of that OnTAP & various other software centric storage capabilities beyond the customer data centers in to other compute platforms such as Public clouds and 3rd party CoLo facilities that NetApp set their vision a while ago.

The idea was that customers can seamlessly move data across all these infrastructure platforms as and when needed without having to modify (think “convert”) the data. NetApp’s Data Fabric at its core, aims to address the data mobility problem caused by platform locking of data, by providing a common layer of core NetApp technologies to host data across all those tiers in a similar manner. In addition, it also aims to provide common set of tools that can be used to manage those data, on any platform, during their lifetime, from the initial creation of data at the Edge location, to processing the data at the Core (DC) and / or on various cloud platforms to then long term storage & archival storage on the core and / or Public cloud platforms. In a way, this provide customers the choice of platform neutrality when it comes to their data which, lets admit it, that is the life blood of most digital (that means all) businesses of today.

New NetApp Data Fabric

Insight 2018 showcased how NetApp managed to extend the initial scope of their Data Fabric vision beyond Hybrid Cloud to new platforms such as Edge locations too, connecting customer’s data across Edge to Core (DC) to Cloud platforms providing data portability. In addition, NetApp also launched a number of new data services to help manage and monitor these data, as they move from one pillar to another across the data fabric. NetApp CEO George Kurian described this new Data Fabric as a way of “Simplifying and integrating orchestration of data services across the Hybrid Cloud providing data visibility, protection and control amongst other features”. In a way, its very similar to VMware’s “Any App, Any device, Any cloud” vision, but in the case of NetApp, the focus is all about the data & data services.

The new NetApp Data Fabric consist of the following key data storage components at each of its pillars.

NetApp Hybrid Cloud Data Storage
  • Private data center
    • NetApp FAS / SolidFire / E / EF / StorageGRID series storage platforms & AltaVault backup appliance. Most of these components now directly integrates with public cloud platforms.
  • Public Cloud
    • NetApp Cloud Volumes        – SaaS solution that provides file services (NFS & SMB) on the cloud using a NetApp FAS xxxx SAN/NAS array running Data OnTAP that is tightly integrated to the native cloud platform.
    • Azure NetApp files        – PaaS solution running on physical NetApp FAS storage solutions on Azure DCs. Directly integrated in to Azure Resource Manager for native storage provisioning and management.
    • Cloud volumes ONTAP        – NetApp OnTAP virtual appliance that runs the same ONTAP code on the cloud. Can be used for production workloads, DR, File shares and DB storage, same as on-premises. Includes Cloud tiering and Trident container support as well as SnapLock for encryption.
  • Co-Lo (Adjacent to public clouds)NetApp private storage        – Dedicated, Physical NetApp FAS (ONTAP) or a FlexArray storage solution owned by the customer, that is physical adjacent to major cloud platform infrastructures. The storage unit is hosted in an Equinix data center with direct, low latency 10GBe link to Azure, AWS and GCP cloud back ends. Workloads such as VMs and applications deployed in the native cloud platform can consume data directly over this low latency link.
  • Edge locationsNetApp HCI            – Recently repositioned as a “Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure” rather than a “Hyper-Converged Infrastructure”, this solution provides a native NetApp compute + Storage solution that is tightly integrated with some of the key data services & Monitoring and management solutions from the Data Fabric (described below).

Data Fabric + NetApp Cloud Services

While the core storage infrastructure components of Data Fabric enables data mobility without the need to transform data across each hop, customers still need the tools to be able to provision, manage, monitor these data on each pillar of the data fabric. Furthermore, customers would also need to use these tools to manage the data across non NetApp platforms that are also linked to the Data Fabric storage pillars described above (such as native cloud platforms).

Insight 2018 (US) revealed the launch of some of these brand new data services & Tool from NetApp most of which are actually SaaS solutions hosted and managed by NetApp themselves on a cloud platform. While some of these services are fully live and GA, not all of these Cloud services are live just yet, but customers can trial them all free today.

Given below is a full list of the announced NetApp Cloud services that fall in to 2 categories. By design, these are tightly integrated with all the data storage pillars of the NetApp Data Fabric as well as other 3rd party storage and compute platforms such as AWS, Azure and 3rd party data center components.

NetApp Hybrid Cloud Data Services (New)

  • NetApp OnCommand Cloud Manager    – Deploy and manage Cloud Volumes ONTAP as well as discover and provision on-premises ONTAP clusters. Available as a SaaS or an on-premises SW.
  • NetApp Cloud Sync            – A NetApp SaaS offering that enables easier, automated data migration & synchronisation across NetApp and non NetApp storage platforms across the hybrid cloud. Currently supports Syncing data across AWS (S3, EFS), Azure (Blob), GCP (Storage bucket), IBM (Object storage) and NetApp StorageGRID.
  • NetApp Cloud Secure            – A NetApp SaaS security tool that aim to identify malicious data access across all Hybrid Cloud storage solutions. Connects to various storage back ends via a data collector and support NetApp Cloud Volumes, OnTAP, StorageGRID, Microsoft OneDrive, AWS, Google GSuite, HPe Command View. Dropbox, Box, Workplace and Office 365 as end points to be monitored. Not live yet and more details here.
  • NetApp Cloud Tiering            – Based on ONTAP Fabric Pools, enables direct tiering of infrequently used data from an ONTAP solution (on premises or on cloud) seamlessly to Azure blob, AWS S3 and IBM Cloud Object Storage. Not a live solution just yet but a technical preview is available.
  • NetApp SaaS Backup            – A NetApp SaaS backup solution for backing up Office 365 (Exchange online, SharePoint online, One drive for business, MS Teams and O365 Groups) as well as Salesforce data. Formerly known as NetApp Cloud Control. Can back up data to native storage or to Azure blob or AWS S3. Additional info here.
  • NetApp Cloud backup            – Another NetApp SaaS offering, purpose built for backing up NetApp Cloud Volumes (described above)
NetApp Cloud Management & Monitoring (New)
  • NetApp Kubernetes service        – New NetApp SaaS offering to provide enterprise Kubernetes as a service. Built around the NetApp acquisition of Stackpoint. Integrated with other NetApp Data Fabric components (NetApp’s own solutions) as well as public cloud platforms (Azure, AWS and GCP) to enable container orchestration across the board. Integrates with NetApp TRIDENT for persistent storage vlumes.
  • NetApp Cloud Insights            – Another NetApp SaaS offering built around ActiveIQ, that provides a single monitoring tool for visibility across the hybrid cloud and Data Fabric components. Uses AI & ML for predictive analytics, proactive failure prevention, dynamic topology mapping and can also be used for resource rightsizing and troubleshooting with infrastructure correlation capabilities.

My thoughts

In the world of Hybrid Cloud, customer data, from VMs to file data can now be stored in various different ways across various data centers, various different Edge locations and various different Public cloud platforms, all underpinned by different set of technologies. This presents an inevitable problem for customers where their data requires transformation each time it gets moved or copied across from one pillar to another (known as platform locking of data). This also means that it is difficult to seamlessly move that data across those platforms during its life time should you want to benefit from every pillar of the Hybrid cloud and different benefits inherent to each. NetApp’s new strategy, powered by providing a common software layer to store, move and manage customer data, seamlessly across all these platforms can resonate well with customers. By continuing to focus on the customer’s data, NetApp are focusing on the most important asset organisations of today, and most definitely the organisations of tomorrow, have. So enabling their customers to avoid un-necessary hurdles to move this asset from one platform to another is only going to go down well with enterprise customers.

This strategy is very similar to that of VMware’s for example (Any App, Any Device, Any Cloud) that aim to also address the same problem, albeit with a more application centric perspective. To their credit, NetApp is the only “Legacy Storage vendor” that has this all-encompassing strategy of having a common data storage layer across the full hybrid cloud spectrum where as most of their competition are either still focused on their data centre solutions with limited or minor integration to cloud through extending backup and DR capabilities at best.

Only time will tell how successful this strategy would be for NetApp, and I suspect most of that success or the failure will rely on the continued execution of this strategy successfully through building additional data and data management services and their positioning to address various Hybrid cloud use cases. But the initial feedback from the customers appears to be positive which is good to see. Being focused on the software innovation has always provided NetApp with an edge over their competitors and continuing on that strategy, especially in an increasingly software defined world is only bound to bring good things in my view.

Slide credit to NetApp & Tech Field Day!

Tech Field Day 17

Chan 1 Comment

This post was republished to ChansBlog at 19:48:55 12/10/2018

Tech Field Day 17

Having attended the Storage Field Day 15 back in March, I’ve been lucky enough to be invited to also attend not only Tech Field Day 17 but also the Tech Field Day Extra at NetApp Insight 2018 (US) too this month. This post is a quick intro about the event and the schedules ahead.

Watch LIVE!

Below is the live streaming link to the event on the day if you’d like to join us LIVE. While the time difference might make it a little tricky for some, it is well worth taking part in as all the viewers will also have the chance to ask questions from the vendors live, similar to the delegates onset. Just do it, you won’t be disappointed!

TFD – Quick Introduction!

Tech Field Day is a an invitees only series of events organised and hosted by Gestalt IT (GestaltIT.com) to bring together innovative technology solutions from various vendors (The “Sponsors”) who will be presenting their solutions to a room full of independent technology bloggers and thought leaders (The “delegates”), chosen from around the world based on their knowledge, community profile and thought leadership, in order to get their independent thoughts (good or bad) of the said solutions. The event is also streamed live worldwide for anyone to tune in to and is often used by various technology start-ups to announce their arrival to the mainstream markets. It’s organised by the chief organiser Stephen Foskett (@Sfoskett) and has always been an extremely popular event amongst the vendors as it provides an ideal opportunity for them to present their new products and solutions as well as new start-ups coming out of stealth announcing their wares to the world. It is equally popular amongst the attending delegates who gets the opportunity, not only to witness brand new technology at times, but also be able to critique and express their valuable feedback in front of these vendors.

TFD17 – Schedule & Vendor line-up

SFD15 is due to take place in the Silicon Valley between the 17-19th of October 2018. The planned vendor line up and timing are as follows

Wednesday the 17th of October
1pm-3pm (9-11pm UK time)

Thursday the 18th of October

8am-10am (4-6pm UK time) 11am-1pm (7-9pm UK time) 3-5pm (11pm-1am* UK time)

Friday 19th of October
11am-1pm (7-9pm UK time)

TFD Extra – Schedule TBC (NetApp Insight 2018 US)

  • Monday the 22nd of October:
    • NetApp Insight general events
  • Tuesday the 23rd of October:
    • 8:30-10am Vegas time / 4:30-6pm UK time : General session keynote
    • Morning: Analysts summit general session
    • Afternoon: TFD Extra session
  • Wednesday the 24th of October:
    • 8:30-10am Vegas time / 4:30-6pm UK time : General session
    • Morning: TFD Extra session
    • Afternoon: TFD Extra session

Previous Field Day event Posts

I’ve learnt a lot during the previous SFD15 participation earlier this year about the storage industry in general as well about the direction of a number of storage vendors. If you are interested in finding out more, see my #SFD15 articles below

Cohesity: A secondary storage solution for the Hybrid Cloud?

Chan 22 Comments

Background

A key part of my typical day job involves staying on top of new technologies and key developments in the world of enterprise IT, with an aim to spot commercially viable, disruptive technologies that are not just cool tech but also have a good business value proposition with a sustainable use case.

To this effect, I’ve been following Cohesity since its arrival to the mainstream market back in 2015, keeping up to date on some of their platform developments with various feature upgrades such as v2.0, v3.0…etc with interest. SFD15 gave me another opportunity to catch up with them and get an up to date view on their latest offerings & the future direction. I liked what I heard from them! Their solution now looks interesting, their marketing message is a little sharper than it was a while ago and I like the direction they are heading in.

Cohesity: Overview


Cohesity claims to be a specialist, software defined, secondary storage vendor who specializes in modernization of the secondary storage tier within the hybrid cloud. Such secondary storage requirements typically include copies of your primary / tier 1 data sets (Such as test & dev VM data and reporting & analytics data) or file shares (CIFS, NFS…etc.). These types of data  tends to be often quite large and therefore typically cost more to store and process. Therefor storing them on the same storage solution as your tier 1 data can be un-necessarily expensive which I can relate to, as an enterprise storage customer as well as a channel SE in my past lives, involved in sizing and designing various storage solutions for my customers. Often, most enterprise customers need separate, dedicated storage solutions to store such data outside of the primary storage cluster but they are stuck with the same, expensive primary storage vendors for choice. Cohesity offers to provide a single, tailor made secondary data platform that spans across both ends of the hybrid cloud to address all these secondary storage requirements. They also provide the ability to act as a hybrid cloud backup storage target too with some added data management capabilities on top so that not only can they store data backups, but also do interesting things with those backup data, across the full Hybrid Cloud spectrum.

With what appears to be decent growth last year (600% revenue growth YoY) and some good customers already onboard, it appears that customers may be taking notice too.

Cohesity: Solution Architecture


A typical Cohesity software defined storage (SDS) solution on-premises comes as an appliance and can start with 3 nodes to form a cluster that provide linear scalable growth. An appliance will typically be a 2U chassis that accommodate 4 nodes and any commodity or an OEM HW platform is supported. Storage itself consist of PCI-e Flash (up to 2TB per node) + capacity disk, which is the typical storage architecture of every SDS manufacturer these days. Again, similar to most other SDS vendors, Cohesity uses Erasure coding or RF2 data sharding across the Cohesity nodes (within each cluster) to provide data redundancy, as a part of the SpanFS file system. Note that given its main purpose as a secondary storage unit, it doesn’t have (or need) an All Flash offering, though they may move in to the primary storage use case, at least indirectly in the future.

Cohesity storage solution can be deployed across to remote and branch office locations as well as to cloud platforms using virtual Cohesity appliances to work hand in hand with the on-premises cluster. Customers can then enable cross cluster data replication and various other integration / interaction activities in a similar way to NetApp Data Fabric works for example for primary data. Note however that Cohesity does not permit the configuration of a single cluster across platforms as of yet (where you can deploy nodes from the same cluster on premises as well as on the cloud enabling Erasure Coding to perform data replication in the way Hedvig storage solution permits for example), but we were hinted that this is in the works for a future release.

Cohesity also have some analytics capabilities built in to the platform which can be handy. The analytics engine uses MapReduce natively within its engine to avoid the need to build external analytic focused compute clusters (such as Hadoop clusters) and having to move (duplicate) data sets to be presented for analysis. The Analytics Workbench on Cohesity platform currently permits external custom code to be injected in to the platform. This can be used to search for contents inside various files held on the Cohesity platform including pattern matching that enables customers to search for social security or credit card numbers which would be quite handy to enforce regulatory compliance. During the SFD15 presentation, we were explained that the capabilities of this platform is being rapidly enhanced to enhance additional regulatory compliance policy enforcements such as those of GDPR. Additional information on Cohesity Analytics capabilities can be found here. Additional video explaining how this works can also be found here.

Outside of these, given the whole Cohesity solution is backed by a distributed file system that is software defined, they naturally have all the software defined goodness expected from any SDS solution such as global deduplication, compression, replication, file indexing, snapshots, multi protocol access, Multi tenancy and QoS within their platform.

My thoughts

I like Cohesity’s current solution and where they are potentially heading. However, the key to their success in my view, would ultimately be their price point which I am yet to see to make sense of where they belong amongst competition.

From a technology and strategy standpoint, Cohesity’s key use cases are very valid and the way they aim to address those is pretty damn good. When you think about the secondary storage use case, cost of serving out less performance hungry, tier 2 data (often large and clunky in size) through an expensive tier 1 storage array (where you have to include larger SAN & NAS storage controllers + additional storage), I cannot help but think that Cohesity’s secondary storage play is quite relevant for many customers. Tier 1 storage solutions, classic SAN /NAS solutions as well HCI solutions such as VMware vSAN or Nutanix, are typically priced to reflect their tier 1 use case. So, a cheaper, more appropriate secondary storage solution such as Cohesity could help save lots of un-necessary SAN / NAS / HCI costs for many customers by being able to now downsize their primary storage solution requirements. This may even further enable more and more customers to embrace HCI solutions for their tier 1 workload too resulting in even less of a need to have expensive, hardware centric SAN / NAS solutions except for when they are genuinely necessary. After all, we are all being taught the importance of rightsizing everything (thanks to the utility computing model introduced by the Public clouds), so perhaps it’s about time that we all look to break down the tier 1 and tier 2 data in to appropriately sized tier 1 and tier 2 storage solutions to benefit from the reduced TCO for the customer? It’s important to note though, that this rightsizing will only likely going to appeal to customers with heavy storage use cases such as typical enterprises and large corporate customers rather than the average small to medium customer who requires a typical multipurpose storage solution to host some VMs + some file data. This is evident in the customer stats provided to us during SFD15, where 70% of their customers are enterprise customers.

Both their 2 key use cases, Tier 2 data storage as well as backup storage now looks to incorporate cloud capabilities and allows customers to do more than just storing tier 2 data and storing back ups. This is good and is very time relevant indeed. They seem to take a very data centric approach to their use cases and their secret source behind most of the capabilities, the proprietary file system called SpanFS looks and feels very much like NetApp’s cDOT architecture with some enhancements in parts. They are also partnering up with various primary storage solutions such as Pure to enable replication of backup snapshots from Pure to Cohesity, while introducing additional features like built in NAS data protection from NetApp, EMC, Pure, direct integration with VMware vCF for data protection, direct integration with Nutanix for AHV protection kind of moves them closer to Rubrik’s territory which is interesting and ultimately provides customers the choice which is a good thing.

From a hardware & OEM standpoint, Cohesity has partnered up with both HPe and Cisco already and have also made themselves available on HPe pricebook so that customers can order the Cohesity solution using a HPe SKU which is convenient, though I’d personally urge customers to order directly from Cohesity (using your trusted solutions provider) where possible, rather than ordering through an OEM vendor where the pricing may be fixed or engineered to position OEM HW when its not always required.

Given their mixed capabilities of tier 2 data storage, backup storage, and ever-increasing data management capabilities across platforms, they are coopeting if not competing with a number of others such as NetApp who has a similar data management strategy in their “Data pipeline” vision (who also removes the need to have multiple storage silos in the DC for Tier 2 data due to features such as Clustered Data OnTAP & FlexClones), Veeam or even Pure storage. Given their direct integration with various SW & HCI platforms removing the need to have 3rd party backup vendors, they are likely going to be competing directly with Rubrik more and more in the future. Cohesity’s strategy is primarily focused on tier 2 data management and the secondary focus is on data backups and management of that data whereas Rubrik’s strategy appears to be the same but opposite order of priorities (backup 1st, data management 2nd). Personally, I like both vendors and their solution positioning’s as I can see the strategic value in both solutions offerings for customers. But most importantly for Cohesity, there don’t appear to be any other storage vendor, specifically focused on the secondary storage market like they do so I can see a great future for them, as long as their price point remains relevant and that great innovation keeps continuing.

You can watch all the videos from the #SFD15 recorded at the Cohesity HW in Santa Clara here.

If you are an existing Cohesity user, I’d be very keen to get your thoughts, feedback using the comments section below.

A separate post to follow looking at Cohesity’s SmapFS file system and their key use cases!

Chan

Storage Field Day 15 – Watch Live Here

Chan 2 Comments

Following on from my previous post about the vendor line-up and my plans during the event, this post is to share the exact vendor presentation schedule and some additional details.

Watch LIVE!

Below is the live streaming link to the event on the day if you’d like to join us LIVE. While the time difference might make it a little tricky for some, it is well worth taking part in as all the viewers will also have the chance to ask questions from the vendors live, similar to the delegates onset. Just do it, you won’t be disappointed!

Session Schedule

Given below is the session schedule throughout the event, starting from Wednesday the 7th. All times are in Pacific time (-8 hours from UK time)

Wednesday the 7th of March

    • 09:30 – 11:30 (5:30-7:30pm UK time) – WekaIO presents
    • 13:00 – 15:00 (9-11pm UK time) – IBM presents
    • 16:00 – 18:00 (12-2am 8th of March, UK time) Dropbox presents

Thursday the 8th of March

  • 08:00-10:00 (4-6pm UK time) – Hedvig presents from their Santa Clara offices
  • 10:30-12:30 (6:30-8:30pm UK time) NetApp presents from their Santa Clara offices
  • 13:30-15:30 (9:30-11:30pm UK time) – Western Digital/Tegile presents from Levi’s Stadium
  • 16:00-18:00 (12-2am 9th of March, UK time) – Datrium presents from Levi’s Stadium

Friday the 9th of March

  • 08:00-10:00 (4-6pm UK time) – StarWinds presents in the Seattle Room
  • 11:00-13:00 (7-9pm UK time) – Cohesity presents at their San Jose offices
  • 14:00-16:00 (10pm-12am UK time) – Huawei presents at their Santa Clara offices

Storage Field Day (#SFD12) – Vendor line up

Chan 2 Comments

Following on from my previous post about a quick intro to Storage Field Day (#SFD12) that I was invited to attend in San Jose this week as an independent thought leader, I wanted to get a quick post out on the list of vendors we are supposed to be seeing. If you are new to what Tech Field Day / Storage Field Day events are, you’ll also find an intro in my above post.

The event is starting tomorrow and I am currently waiting for my flight to SJC at LHR, and its fair to say I am really looking forward to attending the event. Part of that excitement is due to being given the chance to meet a bunch of other key independent thought leaders, community contributors, Technology evangelists from around the world as well as the chance to meet Stephen Foskett (@SFoskett) and the rest of the #TFD crew from Gestalt IT (GestaltIT.com) at the event. But most of that excitement for me is simply due to the awesome (did I say aaawwwesommmmmmeee?) list of vendors that we are supposed to be meeting with to discuss their technologies.

The full list & event agenda goes as follows

Wednesday the 8th

  • Watch the live streaming of the event @ https://livestream.com/accounts/1542415/events/6861449/player?width=460&height=259&enableInfoAndActivity=false&defaultDrawer=&autoPlay=false&mute=false
  • 09:00 – MoSMB presentation
    • MoSMB is a fully compliant, light weight adaptation of SMB3 made available as proprietory offering by Ryussi technologies. In effect its a BMS3 server on Linux & Unix systems. They are not a technology I had come across before so really looking forward to getting to know more about them and their offerings and their partnership with Microsoft…etc.
  • 10:00 – StarWind Presents
    • Again, new technology to me personally, which appears to be a Hyper-Converged appliance that seem to unify commodity server disks and flash with multiple hypervisors. Hyper-Converged platforms are very much of interest to me and I know the industry leading offerings on this front such as VMware VSAN & Nutanix fairly well. So its good to get to know these guys too and understanding what are their Unique Selling Points / differentiators to the big boys.
  • 13:00 – Elastifile Presents
    • Elastic Loud File System from Elastafile is supposed to be able to provide application level distributed file / object system spanning private cloud and public cloud to provide a hybrid cloud data infrastructure. This one is again new to me so keen to understand more about what makes them different to other similar distributed object / storage solutions such as HedVig / Scality from my perspective. Expect my analysis blog post on this one after I’ve met up with them for my initial take!
  • 16:00 – Excelero Presents (hosted at Excelero office in the Silicon Valley)
    • These guys are a new vendor that is literally due to launch themselves on the same day as we speak to them. Effectively they don’t exists quite yet. So quite exciting to find out who they are what they’ve got to offer us in this increasingly growing, rapidly changing world of enterprise IT.
  • 19:00 – Dinner and Reception (Storage Cocktails?) with presenters and friends at Loft Bar and Bistro in San Jose
    • Good networking event with the presenters from the day for peer to peer networking and further questioning on what we’ve heard from them during the day.

Thursday the 9th of March

  • 08:00 (4pm UK time) – Nimble Storage Presents
    • Nimble are a SAN vendor that I am fairly familiar with and have known them for a fairly long time and I also have few friends that work at Nimble UK. To be fair, I was never a very big fan of Nimble personally as a hybrid SAN vendor as I was  more a NetApp, EMC, HPe 3Par kinda person for hybrid SAN offering which I’ve always thought offer the same if not better tech for roughly a similar price point, with the added benefit of being large established vendors. Perhaps I can use this session to understand where Nimble is heading now as an organisation and what differentiators / USP’s they may have compared to big boys and how they plan to stay relevant in an industry which is generally in decline as a whole.
  • 10:45 – NetApp Presents (At NetApp head office in Silicon Valley)
    • Now I know a lot about NetApp :-). NetApp was my main storage skill in the past (still is to a good level) and I have always been very close to most NetApp technologies, from both presales and deliver perspective and was also awarded as the NetApp partner System Engineer of the Year (2013) for UK & Ireland by NetApp. However since the introduction of cDOT properly to their portfolio, I’ve always felt like they’ve lost a little market traction a little. I’m very keen to listen to NetApp’s current messaging and understand where their heads are at, and how their new technology stack including SolidFire is going to be positioned against other larger vendors such as Dell EMC, HPe 3Par as well as all the disruption from Software Defined storage vendors.
  • 12:45 (20:45 UK time) – Lunch at NetApp with Dave Hitz
    • Dave Hitz  (@DaveHitz) who was the NetApp founder is a legend… Nuff said!
  • 14:00 – Datera Presents
    • Datera is a high performance elastic block storage vendor and is again quite new to me. So looking forward to understanding more about what they have to offer.
  • 19:30 – San Jose Sharks hockey game at SAP Center
    • Yes, its an evening watching a bit of Ice Hockey which, I’ve never done before. To be clear, Ice Hockey is not one of my favourite sports but happy to take part in the event :0).

Friday the 10th of March

  • 09:00 (17:00 UK time) – SNIA Presents (@Intel Head office)
    • The Storage Networking Industry Association is a non profit organisation made up of various technology vendor companies.
  • 10:30 (18:30 UK time) – Intel Presents (@Intel Head office)
    • I don’t think I need to explain / introduce Intel to anyone. If I must, they kinda make some processors :-). Looking forward to visiting Intel office in the valley.

All and all, its an exciting line up of vendors and some old and some new vendors which I’m looking forward to meeting.

Exciting stuff, cant wait…! Now off to board the flight. See you on the other side!

Chan