A lot of the show floor was taken up by NetApp itself. The show floor was divided into different sections. Some for the Partner community, some focusing on their products and some focusing on specific use cases. And there were areas devoted to play and areas to relax.

Like other shows this year, there has been a focus on Social Media, which mostly involves tracking Twitter feeds talking about the company and show. I probably need to get plugged in with these folk a bit more.

CEO George Kurian outlined 3 primary goals for NetApp this year. The first is a focus on hybrid multi-cloud, and the Data Fabric is The core of that. The second key focus is to make NetApp available on all the major public clouds. The third piece is to create a cloud-like customer experience and improving the customer experience through Keystone. If the name Kurian sounds familiar, it might be because George’s brother Thomas runs Google’s Cloud. Quite a successful tech family.

There was a section devoted to Channel Partner enablement and the new Keystone tools to help with that. Then they had sections that were more focused on specific use cases. They were Accelerate Your AI Journey, Accelerate Your DevOps Journey, Build Your Data Fabric, Deploy Private Clouds, Fuel Your Enterprise Apps, Innovate on Any Cloud, and Modernize Your IT There was definitely a focus on AI at this show, and considering some of the performance statistics I have seen from their integrations with NVIDIA, they have a good story to tell. They have also made a big push to reach out to the developer community. Certainly they are doing that with their Kubernetes offering, but the effort goes much deeper.

They also took the opportunity to showcase some of their hardware. It was nice to see products like the E-series getting a little time in the spotlight. E-series is a great performing box that can be a really great fit in certain environments and it usually gets overshadowed by the FAS products. I thought this HCI on wheels was kind of fun, they use it to simplify the task of doing POCs.

One of the things I love to do at these shows is talk with some of the up and coming vendors about where they came from and where they are going. I have a couple of quick interviews I want to share with you. The first one up is Igneous. They are a SaaS based data protection product that focuses on backing up NAS data. NAS has been a bit of a tricky one to protect over the years, so I am always eager to hear about new solutions. Here is Christian Smith, VP of Product for Igneous to tell you a little more about the company.

Another company I had never seen before was Cleondris. Piyush Agarwal is a former NetApp employee who is launching the North American offices for this Swiss based company. Cleondris is another data protection offering, and here is Piyush who is the Principal for North America, to tell us more about Cleondris.