NetApp Insight 2019: Part 1
NetApp held their annual Insight conference in Las Vegas again this year. There is always a lot going on in Vegas, and there were several shows in town. There was a Crypto Currency conference happening in my hotel. I can only imagine what kind of shenanigans a bunch of risk taking crypto math geeks could get up to in this town.
There were not a lot of new product announcements this year, it seemed to be more focused on delivering of promises previously made. This is not a bad thing. This is an opportunity to refocus on the fundamentals of the business and realizing their multi-could/hybrid-cloud data fabric story.
Like many of the shows this year, it wasn’t a huge crowd. I think there are several factors in this. For one, I think the increasing focus on simplicity has made some of the educational components of these shows not as significant. Another big factor is budget restriction, people are just not getting the money to go to shows like this, and when they do get to go to shows, they tend to focus on the big cloud centric ones like Re:Invent and Microsoft Ignite.
NetApp has had a great year, although you wouldn’t know it by their press or the stock performance. They were rated by Gartner as a leader in the storage space. They have a solid data lifecycle story, and most importantly, they have been winning big deals. Some of these big deals have been with the hyperscalers themselves. Word has it that Azure has made a significant investment.
One of the big trends we have seen in this space has been a shift to a services centric model. A lot of this has been driven by cloud economics, and this has been reinforced by the explosive growth in SaaS based platforms. As this shift happens, we see a lot of hardware vendors selling their products in consumption based ways.
This year, NetApp announced Keystone. This is a set of initiatives to help simplify the purchase, operations and management of NetApp infrastructure. The idea is to introduce cloud like agility to the purchase of on-prem equipment that extends to the cloud. Companies now have the flexibility to buy equipment outright or manage their resources through a consumption model.
Additionally, they are focused on reducing the complexity of purchasing equipment by simplifying their catalog and reducing the amount of SKUs. They are promising one page quotes, which we haven’t seen in the field yet, but will be very welcome when it arrives. This also extends to the process of renewals with with predictable pricing models that people have been asking for.
On the partner side, Keystone will help generate and funnel qualified leads to their channel partner community. The idea is to speed up and simplify the purchase process. There was quite a bit of floor space devoted to partner enablement at the show, which was interesting because these shows tend to be more end user focused.
Another big focus area for NetApp, is in powering the data-centric vision across on-prem, hybrid and cloud environments. One of the products they were highlighting was Active IQ. This AIOps platform helps troubleshoot and make recommendations across the full fabric. Combined with Cloud Insights, their vision is provide full visibility across your infrastructure and application portfolio. Cloud Insights Premium adds Kubernetes monitoring, topology visualization and insider threat detection. They have also introduced NetApp Cloud Compliance to monitor native cloud storage for compliance issues.
Another product that has been getting some attention is NKS or NetApp Kubernetes Service. This is available on all the major cloud platforms and provides a Kubernetes as a Service to users. It helps you create scalable, ready for production clusters from an easy to use centralized control system, and it works across clouds.
One product I found interesting that wasn’t getting a lot of attention at the show was this little edge device that combined a complete compact computer system complete with NVIDIA GPU and OnTap, NetApp’s storage system. This little device sells for $99 and is targeted at developers looking to experiment with AI workloads for IoT applications. The cool thing about this little version of OnTap called Photon is that it enables you to transfer data across NetApp’s data fabric. This is a really cool way to do edge computing. Here is Fred Jenkins, Global Business Development for AI, talking about it.
