NetApp: My Swiss Army knife

When people ask how I ended up at NetApp after two decades in infrastructure, I always go back to the moment I first realized storage didn’t have to be rigid, opaque, or fragile. It could be flexible. It could be efficient. It could make my job easier, not harder. And for me, that moment happened the first time I deployed NetApp.

But the story starts much earlier, back when I was an IT manager, terrified that my entire data center was sitting on a block array I barely trusted.

My first virtualization project was VMware ESX 3.5, running on an HP LeftHand Networks block array. The nearly 60 servers housed everything, and I had almost no visibility into what was really happening beneath the surface. Thin-provisioned LUNs filled unexpectedly. Storage outages felt random. Every day was a lesson in how little tooling I had. 

Those experiences shaped me. They taught me that storage isn’t just capacity and performance; it’s about control, observability, and predictability. And I didn’t have any of those things yet.

When I later moved into an integrator role at a leading IT solutions provider, I began deploying many different arrays for customers, including NetApp. And that’s where everything changed.

• The magic moment for me was learning how ONTAP handled NFS with VMware:
• NFS datastores showed real, deduplication-aware usable capacity.
• VMware admins saw exactly what storage they had.
• I didn’t have to keep carving new datastores or guessing the actual footprint.

Compared to block LUNs, which told me nothing, this felt revolutionary.

That’s when I started referring to NetApp as the Swiss Army knife of storage. Unified protocols. Data efficiency. Flexibility. Options. Other arrays felt like one-trick ponies.

A school district wanted full Veeam backups every day for a year. On any other system,f this would’ve been absurd. But ONTAP’s deduplication made it possible. 

I presented a 5TB CIFS share, and they effectively stored more than 80TB of backups without needing 80TB of physical disk. When we hit the deduplication theoretical max, I just created a new volume and kept going. 

No forklift upgrades. No angry budget meetings. Just smart, efficient design. 

Another customer — an SAP developer environment using offshore VDI — was falling apart due to latency. We had a tight budget and massive performance requirements. 

Using All Flash FAS (AFF) + Network File System (NFS), I built a 500GB datastore that hosted 100 fully provisioned desktops using only half a shelf of solid-state drive (SSD). 

It rescued the project. And it cemented my belief that NetApp could solve business problems other arrays simply couldn’t.

When clustered ONTAP entered the picture, I’ll admit that my first reaction was fear. It looked complex. But once I realized what non-disruptive operations meant, everything clicked. 

• Hardware refreshes without rearchitecting.   
• Volume migrations without reconnecting anything.  
• Lifecycle management without years of planning.  
• It solved a real pain point that customers had lived with forever.  

When I joined NetApp IT, I was pleasantly surprised by how seriously we take “drink our own champagne.”  
  
Every product NetApp sells, IT uses:

• ONTAP
• StorageGRID
• E-Series
• Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP 
• Data Infrastructure Insights (DII)
• AI Data Engine (AIDE)

My career took me through small IT shops, integrators, AWS, and now NetApp. Through it all, the reason I’m here is simple: NetApp gives practitioners real tools to solve real problems.

It’s flexible, efficient, and powerful. It’s the Swiss Army knife that changed the way I think about storage.