Getting real while leveling up with NetApp

It goes without saying that I was super excited about NetApp Cloud Field Day Exclusive on September 20. Two big elements of it captured my interest: 

• It was at our new office in San Jose, which means it was one of the first face-to-face events I’ve been to for quite some time. Yay! Real people, in person.
• The entire day was dedicated as an exclusive event with the tech community to discuss how NetApp is improving hybrid multicloud experiences for businesses of all shapes and sizes.

NetApp is often a Cloud Field Day participant because we love opportunities to share our story (and our technology, of course) with the world. This year, we opted to host an exclusive event that spanned the better part of an entire day. We wanted to dive into challenging questions and conversations instead of just scratching the surface in a single session.

One of my favorite shiny paradigms? Hybrid multicloud environments. This style of cloud architecture has likely already made itself cozy in your organization. But because it has happened in a piecemeal way, it has fallen on people like you to make it meet business requirements, make it manageable, and above all, make it cost-effective. 

That’s why it was so exciting to spend a full day talking about your hybrid and multicloud challenges. And it was worth it, because we covered “googles” of information. (I know. Dad joke. What can I say?)

Throughout conversations with the delegates, we discussed how to:

• Stop the fire drills. How can we get out of “react mode” with hybrid and multicloud, and, please, can it be done from a single management console?
• Avoid crashes. What features will bypass potential bottlenecks and failures?
• Be future-ready. The fun is in building new stuff, so how can we do it faster, easier, simpler, and as risk-free as possible?
• Eliminate sticker shock. Everyone wants to deliver rich, meaningful, and useful experiences for business users and customers without being surprised by a crazy cloud bill that no one was expecting.

We covered all these subjects and more at our exclusive. Check out the following recap, and if you’re interested in watching the full sessions, you can view them on demand.

We jumped right into things with a Q&A session with Jeff Baxter, senior director of Portfolio Marketing at NetApp. Jeff and I had a great discussion about what trends he and his team were seeing in the market. We dove into the reality of hybrid and multicloud environments and what kinds of demands are often put on organizations that are trying to harness these environments and manage skills, costs, and more. 

Some of the most valuable questions covered in the session included:

• What is your definition of a hybrid multicloud, and which workloads should we be running on which cloud?

• Is the edge its own category, or is it also part of the cloud? And how flexible should our infrastructure architecture be?

• How is NetApp making the cloud better to help me deliver the right hybrid cloud strategy, and what should I be doing first?

Jeff shared his thoughts, based on decades of experience, around trends he is seeing today. The first trend is the move from “accidental” to “intentional” multicloud. Although most enterprises have workloads distributed across all three hyperscalers, the evolution has often been accidental. Becoming more intentional means controlling your own cloud narrative. He also added that it’s rare to split a workload across clouds, but there are specific use cases where it might make sense.

The second trend is the myth that multicloud is a panacea. In many cases, customers are trading the complexity of the data center—maintaining five nines or six nines during a climate or environmental crisis—for the complexity of multiple cloud providers. Cloud requires us to give up more control, and often we don’t know the impact of that until we trip over a specific scenario.

Finally, Jeff wrapped up with a reminder that although NetApp has been a leader in the data center for decades, we were also one of the first legacy vendors to embrace cloud. Did you know? Our initial cloud solutions were introduced in 2014. NetApp® technology is cloud-agnostic, and we focus on building solutions that provide visibility across any cloud and any data center. When you have that established (“dude, where’s my data?”), we layer on value-added services such as privacy, governance, security, compliance, and more.

I’d definitely recommend grabbing your favorite snack and watching the full session. In the next part of my Cloud Field Day recap, we take a closer look at how to solve some real customer problems.