Special Report on NetApp Insight 2019

Insight 2019, the annual NetApp’s user conference, took place a few days ago last October 28-30 at the Mandalay Bay complex in Las Vegas, NV, and this edition was again a good snapshot of the giant’s strategy and ecosystem.

We count 52 sponsors and exhibitors and organizers told us that approximately 5,000 badges were delivered globally for all attendees. The number of executive level customers was up 80% from last year and the number of customers with cloud responsibilities doubled.

NetApp jumped into the conference with a strategic announcement pushed by CEO George Kurian, related to a new subscription program named Keystone (K like Kubernetes, K is a hot letter nowadays) to offer a pay-as-you-go model whatever is the IT environment, on-premises, cloud or hybrid, used by clients. It wishes to simplify and make hyper agile the interaction with its installed base and new customers as simple as 1-2-3. It means the choice of a performance tier, an access method among block, file and object and finally a management client or NetApp.

With DataFabric philosophy, NetApp’s goal is to be considered as the trusted data partner wherever data resides.

Beyond Keystone, the Sunnyvale giant made a ton of products announcements related to Cloud support, AI-boosted IT Ops, OS, flash and hybrid storage array, FlexPod and StorageGRID. We have selected a few ones and we didn’t find any news regarding MAX Data.

Cloud Insights received three new features: Kubernetes Topology Vitalization, Cloud Secure Insider Threat Detection and Active IQ integration. As Mark Andreessen said a few years ago about software eating the world, Kubernetes eats the IT infrastructure and the battle for application portability and workloads migration will shake the industry again soon.

ONTAP was refreshed with a new release iteration with 9.7 with a new UI for ONTAP System Manager, simultaneous mirror tiered data across multiple clouds, data-at-rest encryption and synchronous replication with SnapMirror.

NVMe battle promises to be hot in the coming months illustrating a perfect red ocean. The company also unveiled a new flash system, AFF A400, delivering a new end-to-end NVMe product with NVMe-oF/FC front-end and SED for data-at-rest encryption.

In addition to this AFA, NetApp adds two new hybrid models – FAS 8300 and 8700 – respectively with 7.3 and 14.7PB. Keystone starts with the support of these three new systems.

StorageGRID belongs to the update team with three new models: SG6024 as a full flash object storage flavor, an updated SG60660 scaling to 400PB in one single namespace and the SG1000 serving as an admin and HA/LB node.

The three big cloud service providers, AWS, GCP and Azure, have exhibited of course with pretty large presence as key event sponsors. On Azure, we remind the reader that Azure Files which is NetApp Cloud Volumes Services (CVS) is GA and we were surprised to see GCP promoting CVS as well despite the acquisition of Elastifile a few months ago for a pretty low price confirming a low multiple on total investments received.

Among exhibitors, Komprise announced its beta version of Data Migration S3 for NetApp StorageGRID and the support of NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP with its Deep Analytics feature. Data Dynamics confirmed its unique market positioning for unstructured data management with the acquisition of Infinitus, an Indian company who develops an AI-based content analysis for file data. Hammerspace continues its market penetration with a few OEM deals with a storage vendor, a backup player, a cloud provider, a Kubernetes editor and a VDI actor. Igneous was also present promoting its unstructured data management as-a-service model for data discovery, protection and movement. Rubrik made a push around SnapDiff and its recent integration. Commvault, an other key data protection NetApp partner, who organized its own conference a few weeks ago, continued its promotional journey with its new identity, new product line with Metallic and the acquisition of Hedvig, all initiated by its new CEO Sanjay Mirchandani. We spent some time also at Talon booth wishing to learn more about their ROBO file storage service and we discovered EnsureDR, an Israeli company who offers a DR testing and stress solution. Some vendors who participated last years were absent like Point Software & Systems.

NetApp continues to make a big push towards everything’s cloud.