On Tuesday Februari 4th my day started pretty early with a flight to London from Schiphol Airport. This short flight brought me almost straight to the first UK based NetApp Insight. This one day event was the first of 3 EMEA events NetApp is hosting this year and is a new setup of the before 3 to 4 day events in the past.
Short but filled with information
As the event is shortened drastically into a 1 day venue, the setting was different than the previous years. With a full-packed conference (1200 people!!) the expectations of NetApp were fulfilled and the conference location just big enough. Too be honest I really like the small venue as it helped to see more peers and have more time for networking. Disadvantage is that the amount of sessions is limited and there is no time to overthink and comeback on it the day after. Ofcourse our local NetApp team was present and I’m sure they are always happy to help with follow-up questions.
Cloud data services provider
About 5 years ago the Datafabric strategy was announced by NetApp. In the time Hyperscalers and Software defined datacenters emerged the traditional infrastructure companies came at risk. Instead of fighting against the progress, NetApp took their chance to claim there place within the new emerged clouds. Not only they redesigned their products to have a better Cloud look and feel but also partnered with the different Hyperscalers to be able to deliver solutions together. This resulted in data services like Cloud Volumes Services/Ontap on AWS, Azure and GCP which enables a multicloud strategy but even having Microsoft adopt NetApp with Azure NetApp files.
Now in 2020 I notice the Datafabric is truly getting denser with all the connected pieces of the data services. Not only delivering primary storage from cloud and on-prem with the same functionality but also data tiering and backup to object-store platforms. All to be used by a 1001 possible use-cases from start-ups to AI/ML pipelines.
Datafabric Orchestrator
One of the new product coming out soon will be the Datafabric Orchestrater which will make consuming the multicloud data services easier in the future. With this tooling it will customers and partners will be able to focus on developing their business solutions without the hassle of the technical difficulties of the different clouds. The demo of this tool during the Innovation Hour with Matt Watts on stage was one of the most interesting parts of NetApp Insight for me!
Follow-up
As the portfolio of NetApp is expanding rapidly it cost time to stay on par. During the event many breakout sessions were held and time was too short to attend all. As the events will be posted in the following days I’m going to see a couple of them and try to implement in my lab when possible.
Dive Virtual 
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