This Insight was a special one for me as it marked the 5-year anniversary of becoming a member of the NetApp A Team. I have been working with NetApp technologies for the most part of my career, probably around 11 years or so now, I wrote this last year to mark the 10 years at the ONTAP end.

Back to the A Team, when the program first started there was a small number of us advocating by way of blogging and just being visible on social media and sticking up for the NetApp technology portfolio.

Here is another post marking the 4 year anniversary for the A Team.

So, what did I get up to this year in the new compressed 3-day event,

General Session Interview

As part of the 5-team crew we were asked to be on the super early shift and take part in the general session as everyone was taking their seats.

I cannot find any video footage of the interviews we did though just yet. But it was great to be involved with the guys and continuing to highlight what the A Team is and about.

From left to right:

Sean Luce (@seanluce) Ryan Beaty (@rnbeaty) Chris Maki (@ChrisMaki) Michael Cade (@MichaelCade1) Adam Bergh (@ajbergh)

It was awesome to have my good friend and fellow Veeamer Adam, ask me what I was excited for and what it means to be a year member of the NetApp A Team

Breakout Sessions

Me and Adam also had a couple of breakout sessions, we covered the Veeam integration points with ONTAP and NetApp HCI, still amazed the amount of people that were not aware that we did this, must remember this and keep the story going. Our second session was about Advanced Architectures and we touched on a lot of the public cloud offerings from Veeam.

If you are heading to Barcelona, then me and Adam will be repeating these sessions over there.

Hanging out with these smart people

Introducing the 2018 NetApp A Team group photo. Really enjoyed hanging out with these guys, there just wasn’t enough days of conference to get to know the new folks better.

For those that know me, they know I love a bit of swag, check out those new A Team polo as well they were awesome. Thanks Mom.

On the first evening we had our A Team reception and the 5-year guys were presented with a gift. It’s an awesome jacket top with 5 year on the arm. I will need that in Barcelona the first week of December, but we also got presented with them from the NetApp Legend himself Tom Mendoza.

I know myself, Adam and Chris will be in Barcelona. Check out our breakout sessions, if you see us just stop us to have a chat.

I think it’s fair to say NetApp have really pulled things back in the industry. Maybe they did lose their way and maybe they grew too fast for a period. But the main man Kurian seems to have steered things in the right direction from a business perspective and the tech is I believe in front of the curve.

This week you are going to see announcements from NetApp this is going to range from some significant updates when it comes to ONTAP 9.4, Security, FabricPool and FlexGroups. Oh, and those platforms. Yep this software must run on some hardware, well if you wish too.

I want this post to be an overview post for the other announcements and personally I want to call out some of those milestone features that will arrive with ONTAP 9.4.

Snapshots

Was a limit of 255 snapshots ever an issue…? I only came up against a few enterprise clients where it did, but they were some of the biggest organisations in the world and their use case was some of the most frequent snapshots and retention for really fast recovery.

Now I don’t want to turn this post into a Snapshots vs backup, we all know my feelings on this and it’s a snapshots and backups argument. But these large enterprises were also Veeam customers and they would use Veeam to trigger those application or crash consistent snapshots on a retention as well as leverage those snapshots for a backup to a different media type. The limitation they faced was the 255 snapshots per volume as it meant they could not keep minute-based snapshots for a long period of time. Now with the latest release of ONTAP this is going to increase things by over four times to 1023 snapshots.

ONTAP image installation

Hands up if you are a field installation engineer, or you have faced the task of getting to site and you must download the update image but then you have to setup your own network including web server to get your storage updated, now I cannot complain this method out of hours and some others went toward paying for our wedding. However, …

It might only be a minor thing to the most, but this is massive for those engineers and admin. To be able to update your version of ONTAP via OnCommand System Manager from your laptop is a great thing.

Platform

I will probably come back and have a complete post touching on the platform, and by platform we are talking that physical hardware offering. I am sure someone still gets excited by the hardware side of things.

We will see a new high end as well as entry level all flash FAS and a new entry FAS, 100Gbe and 25GbE networking capabilities. More NVMe over fabric and SSD and 30TB SAS attached SSD.

FlexGroup

Lots of new features and enhancements around Quality of Service and extending current support. I touched on the benefits of FlexGroups when they first came out here.

https://vzilla.co.uk/vzilla-blog/im-bringing-flexy-back-netapp-flexgroup

FlashPool

FlashPool as a feature was released a few versions ago and this update of ONTAP sees some significant enhancements.

Again, like the other pieces I could go into more detail in a separate post. But for the record FlashPool excites me because it changes the barriers, no longer is about keeping data siloed in a datacenter, also it doesn’t have to start with the datacenter with this release support for Cloud ONTAP and ONTAP Select bringing a cloud based or software defined way of tiering into cloud-based storage.

Full disclosure, I am a member of the NetAppATeam and I have attended forum calls and will be attending this week future briefings.