NetApp INSIGHT 2024: Why it matters more now than ever to be there

Simon Sinek tells us to start with WHY…

TL/DR:

When Jensen Huang of NVIDIA said in his 2024 GTC keynote, “...NetApp—nearly half of the files in the world are stored on-prem on NetApp,” you have to ask yourself why. Why would nearly half of the world’s on-premises files be stored on NetApp^® systems?

Come to the NetApp INSIGHT^® 2024 conference and you’ll find out exactly that. You’ll hear about what NetApp refers to as intelligent data infrastructure: real value, real impact, scalable, flexible, secure, proven, and reliable. And you’ll learn how your enterprise can realize the effect of an intelligent data infrastructure.

An intelligent data infrastructure gives you, the customer, the ability to positively affect your business in ways that drive more value and deliver faster results. And it does so securely for any workload in any location. 

• Break down silos. Simplified operations, lower complexity, ecosystem interoperability, less retraining, extending and unifying on-premises environments to cloud or vice versa; your cloud, your way.
• Gain control over cost. Direct cost savings, cost-control levers, flexible consumption—not just on premises but anywhere you deploy your workloads.
• Improve sustainability. Lower your ESG (environmental, social, and governance) scores with actionable recommendations and observability of your entire data infrastructure.
• Keep your business secure. The most secure storage available. Built-in backup, disaster recovery, and ransomware protection with a 99% accuracy rate, a ransomware guarantee, and a cyber vault reference architecture.
• Innovate with AI. One storage platform that optimizes your pipeline, prep, training, inference on premises, in the cloud of your choice—solve for data gravity—with governance and compliance built in.
• Unlock new levels of application agility. Modernize your apps, no matter where they are, securely, with all the enterprise data services you expect.

This will be my twentieth time attending NetApp INSIGHT. I’ve been a customer and a partner of NetApp for more than 20 years, and I’ve leveraged NetApp to help solve countless customer problems in many successful engagements. Full disclosure: I have over the ensuing years developed an affinity, a bias, and a love for all things NetApp.

I’ve found that educated customers and partners make the best decisions and reap the resulting benefits. NetApp INSIGHT 2024 is where you learn the truth about what is possible with NetApp.

This is a technology conference! You’ll hear the latest announcements, consume great content, have your pick of amazing sessions, participate in hands-on labs, and take advantage of free certification testing. You’ll see diverse technology in action, engage with ecosystem partners and the tight-knit NetApp community, and much more.

But, speaking for myself, it isn’t the technology or even the community that brings me back, though NetApp has both in droves. Quite simply, I attend NetApp INSIGHT every year because of NetApp’s consistent technology leadership.

While technology development presents an ever-changing game of leapfrog among vendors, in my experience, NetApp has always been and remains a leader in technology. My perspective of NetApp over the years can be summed up like this: NetApp is playing chess while the competition plays checkers. NetApp is several moves ahead while others react and imitate. Every OEM plays to their strengths and architectures; the key is what they do with what they have, and the journey they enable for their customers and partners.

NetApp brought the first multiprotocol file solution to market and, in 2002, the first unified file and block storage solution. A silo was removed and competitors reacted. Fast-forward, and NetApp redefined (again) what truly unified storage is—not just file and block. (That’s so 2002. It would be like comparing a Sony Walkman with your smartphone.) 

While others claim unification, NetApp has moved the goalposts to include not only file and block but also Amazon S3 and NVMe/[X] protocols. NetApp has extended the reality of unified storage and data services across all three hyperscaler marketplaces and as a first-party cloud-native storage service in AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. It’s the “new unified,” if you will, with fewer silos, and no compromise—your workloads can be placed where it makes sense for you. The target has moved again, and others will react.

NetApp also leaned into and embraced public cloud, hybrid cloud, and hybrid multicloud early on, taking the concepts of unification out of the data center and “storage” and delivering the first viable data fabric to the market. Data fabric is not unique to NetApp in concept, but no true data fabric exists if the on-premises and cloud (marketplace and cloud-native) data services and storage are not unified. The result is portability, flexibility, and even fewer silos. What others struggle with, NetApp simplifies.

All of this innovation is delivered on the most secure storage platform available, with built-in autonomous ransomware protection, detection, and recovery backed by a guarantee and a reference architecture for cyber-vaulting your data.

This is powered by one operating environment, the NetApp ONTAP^® platform with RESTful APIs providing the only storage and data services platform that truly enables a “data fabric” with the NetApp BlueXP^™ control plane, a single pane of glass for configuration, management, optimization, observability with data governance (free), and data protection.

Why do I have a bias, affinity, and love for NetApp? NetApp has been part of every single major transition in the market. It’s a company that was early for unified storage, cloud, virtualization, containers/Kubernetes, and AI. It provides an environment that optimizes cloud operations—security, FinOps, and CloudOps, with cloud-native, modern application integration.

This unmatched platform is brought to customers and partners with a rich ecosystem of technology partners (more than 166). With this ecosystem, wherever NetApp solutions are deployed, you can be confident that they will work as intended. No confusion, just elegant simplicity.

Everything I just talked about forms the foundation for NetApp’s leadership in technology and the intelligent data infrastructure—it can benefit your business in ways you’ve only dreamed about. Join us at NetApp INSIGHT, September 23-25 at the MGM Las Vegas, and get your own answers to “Why NetApp?”

And come find me on the show floor along with the rest of the NetApp A-Team—we would love to meet you and tell you about our real-world experiences with NetApp. Don’t miss this fantastic opportunity to get answers to your toughest questions from a group of IT experts whose combined hands-on experience amounts to more than 250 years buying, using, deploying, and selling NetApp solutions. We’ll see you there!