A couple of weeks ago, NetApp’s conference (Insight) took place in Vegas. It took me a week to recuperate (Vegas) and absorb all the great content, so better late than never. While I am not new to IT conferences like VMworld, CiscoLive and Microsoft Ignite (TechEd) among others, this was my first NetApp Insight I was able to attend. I was on the customer side for 15 years, and when I jumped to the partner side, the conference was opened to customers.. it figures. The great thing is that everyone can go to Insight now. I can see why Insight was previously focused on partners, and employees, as NetApp’s conference is more technical than others in my humble opinion, and I love that.

As far as the content, there were a lot of cool technology announcements. I am happy to see that NetApp is innovating again. I can see how having to support both 7-mode and clustered-mode development was really taking a toll on producing new features, but that is now history. First thing that comes to mind was the expansion of SnapMirror. Now that is has been overhauled, according to the announcement, it will make it across all of NetApp’s products. This is huge, think of AltaVault, e-series, etc. all with SnapMirror. Speaking of SnapMirror, another up and coming release is SnapCenter which is the new Central Management interface for all SnapManager. YESS!! Finally. Like I said before, I was on the customer side for a very long time, and you know how tedious it is to have to manage tens or even hundreds of instances of SME, SMSQL, SMSP, SDW, etc.

Also part of the centralized management that we all love, Cloud ONTAP was demoed with OnCommand Cloud Manager. You can move your data between public clouds (AWS, Azure, etc.) with a quick drag-and-drop. In the demo, they literally clicked on an AWS cloud and dragged it into an Azure cloud, moving the data locality in seconds. This was a pretty awesome demo.

Earlier this year, NetApp announced their All Flash Array (AFA). Although many storage vendors came out with their version first, NetApp took its time to do it right. To prove it, they received outstanding results from SPC1 benchmark test, not only surpassing all of its competitors but also breaking records. So what did NetApp do to highlight this great accomplishment?!?!  They made it better, faster, stronger. A demo by Neto From Brazil, demonstrated > 70% gains from previous results, achieving over 1.18M IOPS with UNDER 1ms latency with an 8-node AFF cluster. This is pretty amazing if you ask me.

Check out the demos in the video below

As always, check back later for new stuff in the IT realm…