The Why of NetApp HCI
Transcript
so in this continued conversation on whether or not NetApp is a storage dinosaur to spin out in the market we're having some really tough conversations on the ground in this conversation I'm talking with chief architect Adam Carter and we're gonna talk about use cases for their HCI product what our customers really doing with this solution and why you shouldn't even have the conversation with Netta hope you enjoyed the conversation [Music] hey guys it's Keith Townsend from the CTL advisor we're here at NetApp in beautiful Boulder
Colorado I have with me Adam Carter chief architect for NetApp HCI whenever I say HCI sounds like a CI so be careful create that yeah so Adam you spent some time with the B brown brick crew going over a ton of the architecture of HCI we're not gonna talk about that what we're gonna talk about is if I put you in front of a CTO architect at a fortune 500 what would be the elevator pitch for why NetApp HCI so what I would say is that
in our HCI we're really much more focused in helping our customers manage multiple cloud and stack environments we see the world now as kind of this essentially hybrid multi cloud where our customers aren't just managing one type of environment they're managing multiple environments and we're really focused in our HCI on helping them handle that world as elegant elegantly and simply as possible and and that that's a bit different than where most HCI platforms I believe our focus is trying to create the platform to be in
and of itself the one stack that that can do everything perfectly and so simplifies your world by you moving everything into that one stack and I think there's some realities in the world that make it very difficult to choose one stack one a type of environment and move between them so when I think of HCI think of exactly that I get a piece of kid on my dock and a half an hour two hours whatever the the time to value is I have that platform up
and running when I think of cloud and multi cloud or hybrid cloud I think of control plane when I don't associate HCI with cloud control plane help me connect the dots sure so the way I would think of HCI kind of traditionally is is that it was consult dating some things that customers found difficult which was compute virtualization storage is kind of consolidating those three maybe networking into a more simplified single system and trying to give you a way to control and connect all of that
assembly as possible really quick stand-up and what I think is really happened is that desire is just as applicable to working in multiple public clouds and so we're trying to continue to simplify this world of ok that did really good for on premise but if you've got a world that's on-premises and cloud which who doesn't right right we want to consolidate a bigger picture than just the compute networking virtualization and storage we want to be able to help you consolidate and manage your entire hybrid multi
Club so with that said there's a lot of vendors vying for that position within the data center yeah then the enterprise if you could control the hybrid cloud you control the keys to the kingdom NetApp has very deep obviously storage and data routes yeah connect the story for us between HCI the ability to simplify the management of all these components right in your data story as it pertains to the public cloud and on-premises sure so so when I look at that picture one of the things
that's key between trying to manage and operate and manipulate a hybrid multi cloud world is that you've got all of these independent stacks in the thing that is the hardest to manage migrate understand in that world is the data aspect of it almost anything else can be picked up and moved if it has no data right address compute if it's network right you know ok I've got a kubernetes resource here I can move to this kubernetes resource here if things are stateless then the idea of
working in this hybrid multi cloud is actually like oh it's extremely simple I'll just stop this here and I'll start it over here as soon as data comes into the picture the pure gravity of that to use that phrase makes it much harder to manipulate that world so our abilities in our data fabric that we had before we were seriously even looking at this hybrid multi-cloud we are seeing it more as the data fabric and looking so much the data and now it's much more about
the apps and managing things around it but that's still such a linchpin to the whole story is how good are we at manipulating storing managing the the hardest part of the picture to solve so we've talked about that at a very abstract layer so far you know kind of where does it fit into organizations architecture make it real for me okay what are some of the use cases or some examples where customers have taken taken HCI the data fabric and aks and combined it to a
solution so when I look at those pieces an easy way to articulate it is like let's say we've got a HCI system running on on-premises and it's got an application and it's got data for it let's just say that application is you know some Windows application kind of in traditional non microservices context it's in a VM and it's running on a database and it's got this data set and you want to get to the point you know ideally I want to now reform that app into
something that is you know completely cloud native and that is not just one big switch you throw that is actually a really hard problem solved and in our context we've got all of the pieces in our portfolio to say okay first of all in the on-premises system we can keep the data intact have an older version of the application running we can start developing new containerized versions of the application and access the exact same data and if you are able to pull that off now that
you've got it containerized you've got your choice of clouds that you can move to and all of those things that simplicity of being able to use a system to develop your new application keep your data intact migrate to it migrate to the cloud is not a straightforward thing to do yourself if you think that through on your own there's a lot of moving pieces you kind of have to design for yourself to do those are just included parts of our system go ahead and stand up
nks start doing new deployment go ahead and move that data from that height that on-prem system to your cloud of choice go ahead and use those containers in your cloud of choice and and you didn't have to make a a lot of decisions up front that locked you into like okay I made that decision on day one now I have to go to cloud XYZ you've got a lot of flexibility in our solution to change your mind and realize you wanted to use a different flavor
of kubernetes down the road or you want it to more if your data into something else down the road so Adam I really appreciate you taking out the time to join the CTO dose and for NetApp sponsoring us here in Boulder Colorado beautiful facility you want to learn more about this conversation follow the brown bag and build a live conversation on Twitter will link the videos down below and we'll have additional conversations with executives and key stakeholders here in Colorado stay tuned for more CTO dos
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