Plain Virtualization

When I join NetApp from VMware after spending a good 13 years, I was amazed and taken aback how much NetApp got to offer to customers. It not just a Data fabric company but lots more in the space of how data are managed, stored, secured, and much more surrounding data. The first thing I learnt about is ONTAP, the powerful software operating system that powers all NetApp hard and soft boxes at the very beginning. It also not just a storage but it is the King of Files for a reason. The unique of NetApp is in its way of storing data, Write Anyway File Layout ( WAFL ). Its ability to handle large amount of small files makes it elite on its own. Today NetApp is the ONLY vendor able to handle File, Block and Object all at the same time with ONTAP. NetApp also have acquired a few solutions over the years specific to how data are created, managed, used and secured. Let's leave that to another post for now. Let me drill into 3 key takeaways on why NetApp how it differentiate itself as the ...

Looking at the trend of data referencing from here . We can see that data has been growing phenomenally. In actual fact, looking at the trend, the boom started in 2020 and has not stop ever since. Source: https://explodingtopics.com/blog/data-generated-per-day  In today infrastructure, we have two major solutions for data management. One is our traditional storage array and the other is HyperConverge Infrastructure (HCI). The latter only started picking up in early 2011 where some of the known names such as pivot3 and the major players after such as Nutanix and VMware vSAN which exist most commonly in most data center infrastructure. As data volume increases and the the adoption of AI, capacity and performance for data management become a crucial requirement. Taking example from the like on virtualization, you can have all the compute resources for your virtual machine, but if your workload data IO and capacity cannot be serve, the bottleneck still exist.  In the wor...

This week marks my 90 days in NetApp. It was truly an eye opener to what thought to be a storage company can do beyond just data storage. NetApp has evolve over the years and with the amount of R&D and investment made to its portfolio that I believe most are not aware just like myself. In my 90 days, I should address what NetApp offers in a nutshell: 1. The only true hybrid and multicloud solution that allows customer to consume storage solution in any shape and form with the same skillset and knowledge. NetApp's secret sauce, ONTAP is the underlying software that empowered its storage solution since the very beginning as the King of NAS. Of course as a software, it has been able to support block and object similarly well. ONTAP One is the only soft license that comes in all NetApp unified storage solution at no additional charges. But the power of ONTAP does not stop there, ONTAP Select , a virtual machine offering allows customer to consume the same ONTAP storage, right off ...

As per the article and confirmation from email from Broadcom to all their partners, there will be a minimum purchase for New VCF license purchase for new order starting 10th April 2025.  What will be your impact to customers like yourself? Basically for any new project, a minimal purchase of 72 cores license is required whether or not your compute workload is going to be lesser. This does not change the minimum purchase of 16 cores per CPU which still stand. While that is true, the above statement only applies to new purchase, if you are doing expansion or renewal of licenses, this does not change. So if you really just need a small setup using 3 servers each, taking a supported Dell PowerEdge R350 with vSphere 8.0U3 as per VMware site , with a minimum of 8 cores per CPU, you will need 24 cores license which will have a surplus of 48 cores (72-24). That is a bumper. For the above example, this will be wastage. However, as I mentioned, expansion and renewal are not impacted....

VMware vSAN is a Hyper-Converge Infrastructure solution which is part of VMware Cloud Foundation  (VCF) or VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) bundling.  While VMware vSAN helps customer to achieve a SAN like storage pooling using local HDD on each server together, it is still limited on features it encompasses in comparison to a physical SAN. This is where NetApp ONTAP Select which will complement the missing gap. ONTAP Select is the virtual appliance of the well known ONTAP that runs on all NetApp Unified Storage appliance. One of the major function that ONTAP Select brings to vSAN is on Data management and Protection. This is very useful for protection specific applications especially application aware application by ONTAP Select. Some of the enterprise applications supported can be found here . A detailed kb from Broadcom can be found  here . With ONTAP Select, these applications that are supported can be protected via SnapMirror which can provide an application consiste...

Back in the days of VMware, I was fortunate to talk to many customers and involved in numerous discussion on helping them from on premise to private cloud, hybrid cloud to public cloud and MultiCloud to today, Intelligence running in the cloud. Many thought that might change when I move on to my next career. In fact, I carry on that discussion with my customers today the same way I did in the past. That was also one great reason I joint NetApp. Let me show you where this happens: Reference link As changes of IT evolved, the amount of data customer have to collect, manage, protect and secure is way more than before. More so around complexity and managing the amount of data threats. In 1996, NetApp introduced ONTAP to solve the issue with local data siloes with NAS to help customer manage the large amount of data in files and block. When virtualization take place, NetApp supported a wide range of solutions such as VMware, Hyper-V, KVM, etc. helping customers manage that data growth. Even...