[music]It was the year 2000. The industry was eating itself alive. Microsoft had released Windows 2000 with this new phenomenon called Active Directory, but no one outside of it cared because they had their heads wrapped around changing to four-digit years.Me? Well, I just gotten my very first mega certification, MCSE 2000, with workstation and exchange electives. If you know, you know. After 18 months and seven exams, I had finally done it, followed shortly by CCNA and CCNP. I was a cocky little 23-year-old that had just summited Everest, figuratively speaking, and I was going to conquer the tech world. Was never going to need to learn anything new ever again. And you know, for a few years there, I wasn't wrong. It was a really good time to be a combo MCSE and CCNP. Data center builds, T3 circuits, and exchange migrations kept me busy as a contractor for the next 5 years. But then something happened.This little thing called VMware started to rear its head. I was immediately obsessed and took to implementing it wherever I could. A year later, I got my VMware VCP certification and again thought I was going to conquer the world and never have to learn anything new. Areyou noticing a pattern here? Are you picking up on the trend? Because the funny thing is that is exactly what our entire industry is going through right now as we speak. If we put this on a timeline, we can visualize the evolution that the industry has gone through just in the last 20 years. I mean, hell, it took us 15 years to go from Active Directory to the birth of Kubernetes in 2015. And in the middle of all of that was the mammoth virtualization era. And while we want to romanticize VMware and virtualization,it really turned out to be a means to an end, didn't it? Iknow, I know, hot take. But if you look at the cloud landscape today, what are VMs? They're commodity resource shells that are there to serve as endpoints of compute and memory in order to run apps. Let's call it what it is. But that's not really the point I'm trying to make here. If we assess where we are in the industry in 2022 as an industry, you could put us out here pretty deep into serverless and getting into SAS. Technologies and platforms like ECS and Fargate alongside EKS have completely removed the infrastructure complexities of virtualization. Sorry it folks, the developers just don't need us anymore. They've got an American Express card and an AWS account. But here in lies the conundrum we face. And while the industry may be way out here, the enterprise is still lagging around back here for the most part.They're very comfortable with their virtualized infrastructure and hesitant to flip things on their head and tear down their VMware environment they've spent 10 plus years building and perfecting, right? Sure, you have a few devs here and there playing with Portainer and Mini CCube on their laptops, and they've got some apps refactored and running into containers, but for the most part, they're still dependent on their IT and systems admins to deliver resources for their production QA and testdev environments. The beauty of this is that we've started to see that mindset shift over the last three to five years, but there is a lot of inertia and a lot of technical debt to contend with here. Ijust realized I did a terrible job and didn't introduce myself at the beginning. So, let me throw this back up here real quick, guys. My name is Nick Howell and I am the global field CTO for public cloud services here at NetApp. And I'm here today to talk to you about modern data management in the cloud. And when I joined the company in 2011, I came in as a customer who had spent many years managing NetApp storage. Within a couple of years, I was doing some crazy experimental stuff like getting our complex storage operating system known as ONAP to run in an EC2 instance. I know it took several tries, but I eventually got it to work. If you told me back then that 10 years later I would uh I'd be presenting at an AWS show on how customers could do the exact same thing but just spun up as a handsoff managed service. I probably would have laughed in your face. But that's the reality of it we face now in 2022. And it's kind of like I hear some echoes of those same sentiments and experiences throughout the last couple of decades. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed that ride down memory lane. But enough nostalgia. Let's get down to business. It's possible that you're sitting there asking, "Who the hell is NetApp? And what's it doing in my AWS console?" So, let's address those. Because of the last two plus years of innovation, engineering, and hard work that a lot of people at both AWS and NetApp put into creating a new service called FSX on, we were awarded design partner of the year at AWS reinvent last fall, and we couldn't be more proud. Since it was launched at AWS storage day uh back in August of 2021, it's become one of the fastest growing services in all of AWS. And I think there's a really good reason for thatwe're going to go over here in a bit. But for those who are still unsure of who NetApp is or why some dude from a storage array manufacturer is up here talking to you, I hope you'll allow me a few minutes to fill you in. NetApp itself was founded in 1992. Hey, fun fact. Did you know that one of the founders of NetApp, Dave Hitz, went to Princeton with Jeff Bezos? Anyway, we are celebrating our 30th anniversary this year and we've spent the last three decades perfecting the delivery and protection of data through our enterprise storage arrays and our suite of software products. We've consistently been ranked as the number one storage operating system for many years now by Gartner, IDC, and many other analyst firms. And more recently, we've been paving the way for our enterprise and cloudnative customers to consume ONTAP as a service in the public clouds. Now, to do this, we had to turn a pretty big ship. And we've spent the last decade innovating, acquiring, and shifting our priorities as a company to hyperfocus on cloud as an endgame, all while continuing to serve and expand our existing and loved install base. But if you've listened to any of our recent public earnings calls, you'll hear that our focus, as well as most of our reward, has been on cloud. And the strategic acquisitions we've made in the last few years have certainly helped us achieve that position faster than anyone ever expected. What we discovered along the way is probably similar to what all of you have experienced as well. that this digital shift was universally affecting every industry and vertical from retail to manufacturing to oil and gas, health care, financials, public sector. All of them were looking at cloud as the answer.But an answer to what exactly? We'll come back to that because we have to talk about some of the things that we ran into along the way that have affected our customers and held them back. Now, I personally spent the better part of a year as an old infrastructure dinosaur analyzing, working with customers and partners trying to find out what was slowing down cloud adoption. And you might be surprised to hear what I found out. Hey, storage is hard. It's always been hard and it always will be hard. But data, folks, data is the crux of all things. The performance and availability of data for any workload will have a direct effect on your ability to operate. Now, it's important to remember that while AWS was busy building and enhancing the elastic cloud and its everexpanding portfolio, we were busy spoiling our customers on prem with things like 6ix9ines of availability and submillisecond latencies and seemingly infinite amounts of storage capacity. thanks to some of our advanced efficiency techniques. So when AWS showed up to that same enterprise customer with maybe three nines of availability and what EFS, you can understand when the reaction might have been eh somewhat less than enthusiastic.Now on top of that we have absolutely mastered delivering unified storage NFS SMB and even SAN and not just one or two versions of those protocols literally all of them at the same time from the same system or service. Now I'mpreaching all of this to you as someone whose amount of sleep that I got used to be determined by whether or not the Exchange server and the Oracle database were online. Why? Well, because I managed the storage arrays that both of those depended on. If those went down, I didn't sleep or eat until they were back up. Storage matters because data matters. And access to data requires performance and it requires availability. Now, following on from that, let's talk about the issues that arise when you try to bring those same caliber of workloads up to the cloud. Don't forget, we've been running ONTAP in AWS ourselves for years now. So, we've gotten the brunt of it from a lot of customers on their concerns. It's too expensive.We don't understand what we're spending. Migration is hard. We simply don't have the expertise on hand to work in AWS. This is what the entire industry is up against right now. Migrating data and skills gaps. They have nothing to do with what version of NFS your feature or product supports. Right? So, as an industry, we've got some big picture problems to solve. And frankly, we went through this when we were transitioning to VMware and virtualization in the 2000s as well. So, how do we empower our customers to use existing skill sets to operate in the cloud? How do we make migrations of all kinds of workloads easier? and how do we help them control and understand what it is they're actually spending? But most importantly, how best can AWS and NetApp help one another with this quandry for our mutual customers? One last thing, in addition, we felt a great disturbance in the force. An extreme shift was happening. Focus was moving away from sand block storage environments and towards file-based workloads.Hm. And hey, don't take my word for it. Here's data from IDC, ESG, and our own surveys that we conducted last year showing that 80% of all worldwide data will be unstructured by 2025, three years. 75% of file-based enterprise apps are candidates today to move to the cloud. And 60% of organizations expect to be mostly cloud-based by the end of this calendar year. Our customers have told us they want to take what they have running today on prim, be able to pick it up and place it into the cloud and have it continue to run.None of them really want to spend time refactoring their applications. Well, not yet, at least. Now, we can certainly sit around and debate the merits of whether or not that's a sound plan or we can simply get out of the way and give them what they want. So, let's break each of these down a bit further. Starting with migrations. And there are many different types of migrations out there. You've got your data center evacuations. You've got your lifting and shifting of running workloads, backup and DR. Hell, even launching new applications can require some elements of migration. Regardless, they're going to require some level of heavy lift just to move large data sets to the cloud. I think we can all agree on that. Secondly, unstructured data. Personally, I think this has been grossly undervalued and overlooked from the get-go. the get-go. the get-go. It makes up the lion share of a storage footprint on prim and could be the unicorn rainbow for storage in the cloud. We've spent a lot of time in the past few years focusing on tier one missionritical apps and workloads because those are the ones that are hard and they require all kinds of crazy certifications.However, they don't typically consume the most storage. Home drives, backups, departmental shares, long-term archives, legal holds, potentially hundreds of pabytes of data over time. So, okay, what we need here is a mutually beneficial service for both AWS and NetApp that enables enterprise customers to get the performance, availability, and centralized management as well as the cost controls that they need to operate their business natively in the cloud. It needs to be easy to migrate to and from, and it needs to take advantage of decades of learning in NetApp storage without having to manage the overhead of a storage array or completely retrain entire skill sets for staff. Wow. Does something like that even exist? Wouldn't it be great if there was something that could do all of that? There is. Now I give you FSX for NetApp ONTAP. Now of course Ed absolutely nails it here but the unintended benefit is that many cloudnative AWS customers have likely never heard of NetApp or OnTap and they've been looking for something that could centralize and consolidate both their file and block workloads into a single management platform to provide storage for their various workloads. Hey, even more. They're getting a fully featured storage operating system. It's the same one we use to run production storage arrays on prem. Existing ONAP users, well, y'all are going to be able to dive right in with all of the commands and functions that you're used to using. And new customers, well, you guys, you're discovering ONTAP for the first time. You are going to fall in love with its dduplication and other storage efficiencies as well as the performance it delivers to your workloads.All of this sold, delivered, managed, and supported directly by AWS. Now, this is where we start getting into the fun stuff. I don't need to rattle off every bullet on this slide. You can pause the video here if you need to. But the benefits, they span both NetApp and AWS.Thisright here is what we spent two years ensuring that it wasn't some halfbaked service that didn't have support for anything. We wanted it to support a majority of things customers know and love from day one. And not just from a features and functionality perspective, okay, but across all kinds of use cases from enterprise apps and fileshares to niche lines of business applications, data protection, testdev. I mean back at storage day in September when FSX ontap was announced. It was launched with support and integrations for all of these products and services as well. You can monitor it with Cloudatch, use it as a source for SageMaker Canvas, stand up new instances of it with Cloud Formation templates. But that's just the beginning. Where this gets really fun for a customer beyond just integrating it with native AWS services is layering additional data management services on top of that. See, part of what we at NetApp have been working on for the last 5 years or more is extending our own services. Customers can choose to deploy FSX ONAP from the AWS console or from NetApp's cloud manager. In addition, we can scan that data for ransomware, examine it for compliance, and cascade multiple layers of replication and backup, all orchestrated from a central guey or through APIdriven workflows. These are all data management tools from NetApp that exist today in your tool belt that I believe will drive adoption of FSX ONAP to the moon while giving all of you the feel-good warm fuzzies that your data is being properly curated by one of the industry's leading storage providers.So whether you're building in AWS or not, NetApp could facilitate the movement of your data, backups, caching, and more to an instance of FSX onap in AWS.And just in the few months that this service has been available, it's been one of the fastest growing and adopted services. And it's even built on a consumption model, which is great news for all of you.can find demos, walkthroughs, free trials, and how-to guides all over at cloud.netapp. netapp.comfor all of these products and we have an army of technical staff waiting to help you build cool stuff. Now, to close things out here, I wanted to leave you with some additional links for more info that you can share uh with your peers. And furthermore, if you have any questions, I'll do my best to field them. One of the things that I miss the most is walking off stage after a presentation and having conversations off to the side, sometimes for more than an hour. But in the meantime, I'd like you to come find me and my videos on YouTube. You can follow me on Twitter. Hell, shoot me a message on LinkedIn and I'll get right back to you. Actually, the best thing you could do is join the active and official NetApp Discord community.Either way, if you need help or have questions, I'd be more than happy to help answer them. I hate that I can't be there with all of you, but here's hoping that we get past that soon and we can all be in the same place together again at the next summit. Have a great year. Please do fill out your surveys and go kick some ass in 2022. [music]