Solving customer problems in real-time with NetApp

When I sat down to give you the rundown about NetApp at Cloud Field Day, I knew there was too much good stuff to fit into one blog post. In part 1, we talked all about the pains of managing the hybrid multicloud and how to make your cloud life just a little easier. Here in part 2, you’ll read about some of the real-world issues we discussed as well as our catch up with our good friends at Google.

One of the things I often hear from cloud professionals is that they’re frustrated with the amount of “marketecture” and slideware that’s presented as “solutions.” A picture alone doesn’t do much for you when your job is to make sure that the underlying infrastructure is sound. So, we thought we’d spend some of our time at ourexclusive walking you through how you can solve some real-world challenges. 

Chuck Foley, our energetic and passionate senior director of Marketing at NetApp^®, took us through some real-world situations. He outlined several common scenarios that cloud leaders face, such as how to:

• Mitigate skill gaps within existing teams
• Deal with the increasing complexity of hybrid and multicloud environments
• Optimize costs
• Manage multicloud operations
• Ensure consistency

As Chuck explained, a company’s data is its gold mine, and companies want to hold on to as much of it as possible while doing as much with it as possible. The trouble is that this data is often spread across multiple environments, whether it’s an on-premises environment or hyperscalers, depending on the business use case. This creates a situation where organizations have different teams to manage workloads in different cloud providers, creating a people potpourri that’s hard to manage, hard to hire for, and hard to retain. It doesn’t end with people, either. There are also multiple frameworks, different toolsets and billing models, and a level of complexity that leads companies to scale back and sacrifice business gains to save money.

This is where our Cloud Solutions Architects, Vishnu Cheruvally and Greg Marino, stepped in to help, showing us how to solve problems like:

• Building a backup capability that spans on-premises and cloud, as well as from cloud to cloud, factoring in both the security challenges and the cost management requirements of businesses today
• Configuring enterprise applications like SAP in the cloud, where business needs dictate crazy, no-room-for-error requirements for ultrahigh performance and ultrahigh security, without adding complexity or losing the qualities you love about them on-premises (resilience, anyone?)
• Identifying, investigating, and governing the data that organizations store all over the place, both on-premises and in the cloud, no matter what your organization is or what kind of data you host

Then came my (and many others’) favorite part: lunch. Hey, a girl’s gotta eat! I always find it gives everyone a chance to chat in a much more chill environment and to say things they wouldn’t otherwise share in a formal session. Over our sandwiches, sparkling water, and chocolate brownies (yum), we talked about everything from whether security really is the biggest factor inhibiting successful hybrid multicloud to the importance of automation in making complex environments manageable. I got to hear what cloud professionals were struggling with across specific industries and what solutions in the market were helping them solve these problems (including which so-called solutions are more trouble than they’re worth).

We wrapped up the day with a Q&A session with Dean Hildebrand, technical director, Office of the CTO at Google Cloud, and Sean Derrington, group PM of Storage at Google Cloud. I especially love chatting with Dean. Not only do we go way back, but he has also been there since the beginning of our more than 12-year storage partnership with Google Cloud. There was so much to pack into this Q&A session. For starters, people are very curious about what Google Cloud is up to. While other hyperscalers, like AWS and Azure, do a lot of marketing, Google sometimes plays coy about its current cloud activities. This session was a chance for audience members to get a peek behind the curtain. We chatted about all kinds of things, including: 

• The growth of enterprise workloads in the cloud, which is driving demand for file services
• The value of having seasoned experts in the industry for file services
• How Google Cloud and NetApp are working together to make file services the best they can be in the cloud
• The future of cloud file storage and what we’re all hoping it can bring to make enterprise IT even more successful with digital transformations

All in all, it was a great opportunity for our audience to get to know the Google Cloud and NetApp partnership a little bit better. 

Don’t worry. We’ll see you soon. Even if you didn’t get to catch us at NetApp Cloud Field Day, we’ll be out and about talking all things cloud for the rest of the year. You can find us at Google Cloud Next, Microsoft Ignite, and AWS re:Invent, not to mention our very own NetApp INSIGHT^® conference! In the meantime, you can watch all of the NetApp Cloud Field Day Sessions. See you soon.

And if you missed Part 1 of my recap, you can check it out here. We douse the flames on some of your burning questions about managing hybrid multicloud environments.