BlueXP is now NetApp Console
Monitor and run hybrid cloud data services
All right. So, as you said, my name is Derek Elbert. I'm going to move forward a slide. Um, so I want to touch on so I'mpart of Worldwide's global solutions and architecture team, right? And we are a huge organization inside worldwide on the pre-sale side and we span basically these seven solution areas, right? And these have been modified a little bit this year to cover, you know, some things that are more recently talked about such as modern data center and AI has been a big topic, right? But how we try to help solve customer problems are across these seven pillars, right? And you can see the areas of specialty underneath and there's a youcan bet that there's a person like me um that covers each of those specialties, right? So what we hear across the top from customers and how we solve it across the bottom and then I'll pass it to Brad to cover this slide.>> Yeah. So I could this slide here. I could talk for all 20 minutes. I'm going to try I'll definitely condense it down. But the first slide you saw probably seven or eight different areas for customers that we need to do something. This process here is what we use to leverage our starting on the left ideation session. We have experts. We have subject matter experts like a Derek. We have data scientists. We have experts that cover all gamuts of the seven or eight things that you saw in the previous slide. We literally will walk through and ideulate towards an outcome on the right hand side and we will walk through and identify what that what does that solution look like? What's it going to solve for? What are the briefings and demos and sandboxes? And right here I'm going to touch on the advanced technology center. This is something that honestly nobody else really has. We've invested hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars into this advanced technology center where there's solutions that cover every aspect of the previous slide. We will lean into that to leverage and make sure that we're eliminating risk. We're expediting how do we get to a solution. We'll go through workshops. We'll go through training sessions. We'll go through proof of concepts. And at the end of the day, we'll drive through every single one of these and come up with an outcome. And we'll leverage our global supply chain, the hundreds of C countries that we have the ability to deliver to. So integrating coming up with a solution and at the end of the day delivering an outcome to the customer that's second to none. All right. So you saw the first slide that I presented, right? This is a modified version of that slide just to articulate how we layer in the NetApp portfolio, right? So you can see the NetApp portfolio across the bottom, right? Um and all of the ecosystem partners that are on the very bottom of this screen um tied to the seven solution areas, right? And you know a lot of the conversations that we have with our customers are inthat a IML cloud and infrastructure space and how we stitch everything together, right? Andwhat a lot of other partners don't offer is that layer in the middle, right? So with our partnership with NetApp, we have worked through the partner teams to build out customersp specific programs to help lead customers to NetApp solutions, right? And ultimately it'sless about what the individual architecture is or what the individual, you know, storage infrastructure is and more about what's your problem, Mr. customer and how can we provide a solution coupled with NetApp technology and maybe throw in you know a cloud provider or a Nvidia andbuild a solution to solve that problem. Um so this is a veryuh pivotal slide with how we go to market directly with NetApp. So this slide right here and I'm going to touch on the whole generative AI topic but that topic we could drill down into so many different directions and you can take this same kind of framework and plug in any kind of solution that we might want to whether it's hybrid cloud whether it's private whether it's public but I want to touch on AI and this is an area where my personal opinion is worldwide technology and our partnership with NetApp and our partnership with Nvidia, we're veryuniquely positioned when it comes to artificial intelligence. We've been driving AI solutions inside of WT and with some of our customers for about a decade. We've got roughly 150 data scientists that understand this marketplace so that we can bring to bear with our customers. But normally you would start on the right left hand side. This is where customers would normally start. Honestly, we like to start with the outcome in mind that we want to try and drive to around AI, Gen AI, LLM, chat, GPT, etc. So, we have the ability to go and put to pull together all of the different architectures, all of the different solutions that are going to meet the demands that a customer has. We've got the framework. We have the services organization that is so deep and wide that we help eliminate and reduce some of the risk that's going to come into play with our customers that are starting to move towards an outcome. This area here, experimentation, testing, enablement. Again, this is where that framework comes into play that we've built out that we can leverage to help drive identifying GPU capacity, identifying how do we go build those large language models that most customers are just now starting to experiment and touch on. How do we go identify out at the edge um computer v digital twins, text, video, etc. Um and then we'll help identify and help buildout and what that what does that outcome look like? What are the results going to be that we can drive with that customer? What does the total cost of ownership start to look like? And at the end of the day, pull together everything that's on the right hand side and back to that advanced technology center. We've built out already what we call an AI composable lab. Ilike to call it an AI center of excellence where we've literally are starting to build out almost every single solution, every single outcome and examples with customers that we leverage inside of that advanced technology center with our partnership with Nvidia and NetApp. Um, I'll stop there before I go any further, but this is an area that we're investing hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars worth into and around our organization and the training and with our customers. Um, yeah, I'll stop there, Derek. there, Derek. there, Derek. All right. So, you can read the slide. I'm going to I'm not going to read to the slide at all. Um, I'm just going to kind of tell a story, right? Because this goes back to those joint investment programs that we have, right? And these are true outcomes that we've delivered for customers, right, based off those programs. And you can see like this one was really around cost and performance and it was a multicloud solution. And the customer came to us because of some work that we were doing just general racking stack infrastructure. Uh it wasn't even in the US, it was in the UK, but they had a problem, right? They were already in Google Cloud. They were using Google Cloud native file storage and they were like, we're spending way too much money, right? We're spending $1,150 per terabyte per month. How can you help us worldwide reduce that cost? That was the main concern, right? Obviously, they didn't want to lose performance, but they wanted to reduce the cost. So, Ishould note that this customer wasn't a NetApp customer at that time, right? So, we did what we do best, right? We're like, let'sput a few solutions together. We'll position them in front of the customer. They gave us a list of criteria that this solution had to meet. It was like a mini RFP, right? It was all NFS, uh, global namespace. Um, it had to be, you know, certain RPO, certain RTO, they needed to do snapshots. It needed to be multicloud functional because even though they were in Google Cloud, they need they had workloads that were also in AWS. And so we put a few solutions in front of them. One was a private cloud solution. Um, so you know, you utilizing their data centers that they already had andmaybe moving some of that data back from Google Cloud. Then we positioned a NetApp solution, right? Cloud volumes on tap because it fit best forwhat they were trying to do. And then another competitive solution, right? And just based off what we put in front of them, they said, I really am interested in this NetApp solution, right? Itlooks like on paper it fits all the needs, right? thecriteria that we have from an infrastructure standpoint and management standpoint it fits all the needs. So we used the programs that we built with NetApp and we actually got in deep with the customer and we spent 30 days with the customer and we said hey do you want to use the ATC to do this testing and they were like no we're already in Google cloud just help us deploy this solution in our own VPC and we'll do the testing and you can consult us along the way. So, we spent, you know, a significant amount of time over a 30-day period with this customer. I think we met at least twice a week, sometimes three times a week for two or three hours because they knew nothing about NetApp, right? They knew nothing about ONAP and so everything was new to them. Um, at the end of it, right, like we used a few other solutions in there because they had to have the ability to move that native file storage in Google Cloud onto NetApp Cloud volumes on tap. Um, and so wethrew in a few other solutions and showed them how that would work, but at the end of it, you know, that cost conversation thatwas brought up initially because of the features that are built into ONAP and our ability to show them to the customer, specifically the ability to tier, um, they went back and said, "Hey, like 98% of our data is inactive right away, right? Like within a first couple days, our data is inactive. So it doesn't need to sit on this persistent disc, this high performing disc. We can move it off to cheaper storage. So we turned all that on. And at the end of it, we did some cost exercise for the customer and they that $1,150 number per terabyte was reduced to $200 or $250 per terabyte. It depending on which Google Cloud region their workload was in, right? Because it's a little bit more expensive for the infrastructure. Um, and then on top of that, right, they wanted to maintain performance. Well, they hit the NetApp solution from every performance angle, every workload that they had, you know, uh different read write workloads, a mixture ofhow they were accessing the data from an application standpoint. And the NetApp solution was at the same level or better with some of those um workloads than the solution that they were already using. So, Imean to the customer, this was a no-brainer, right? like the technology spoke for itself. It met all the criteria and it helped deliver on what that main problem was which was driving down cost that they were spending on native file storage. All right. So,this one uh and this could play like thisis based off a specific customer, but this plays in a lot of other customers that we worked with, right? Worldwide as a whole like we sell a lot to people that are in the data center, right? They're in the data center, they're buying infrastructure, they're experimenting with the cloud. We have very few cloud first or people that are born in the cloud customers, right? And so the majority of our customers are in this swim lane, right? where they have a lot of workloads on prim. They are trying to get applications into the public cloud, but they need that data to move, right? Or they need to be able to access that data maybe in both places. Andthat's and that's exactly what was going on with this customer, right? So, we um we used the ATC for this one because we could provide a testing platform for the customer faster than they could build it themselves in their own data center. So, we built it out in the ATC. We gave them full access to the environment. Um, they had isolon that they were that they had on prem that they were trying to reference from AWS and the latency wascrazy, right? Like in totally inoperable, unusable, horrible user experience, horrible employee experience. So thatwasn't a good solution for them. So what we did, we're like, well, NetApp has a technology built into ONAP called Flex Cache, and that will allow you to keep your source on prem on O on you can cache a copy of that inAWS. Andright around the same time, FSX for ONAP had come out, right, or FSXN. And so we used that as the landing spot for that flex cache. So webuilt it out for them. They tested in the ATC. Um, we also showed them what a full data migration would look like from Iselon to ONAP because they were full multi-protocol and they were very happy withwhat that would look like. And so at the end of it, right, thatlatency which was the main issue, right, and making the application inoperable that was reduced by 15x, right? So sub 5 millisecond latency for mostworkloads andthe customer experiencesignificantly improved, right? And by the time thatwe got to the point where they were actually buying some ONAP hardware, uh they had already solidified that FSX for ONTAP would be the landing space for any multi-protocol file workload that was going to sit in AWS. So that was a win before we'd even done any on-prem purchases. And then theywent ahead andbought a bunch of um ONAP on prem and they're in the process or already have moved the data from isolon to ONAP andare continuing to use the flex cache technology and as ONAP um has future releases, right? That flex cache technology went from reads initially that they were caching to now it can also do right caching as well, right? So it has significantly improved that user experience and made the solution even better just through utilizing ONAB. Um I didn't talk about this on the last one but in both of these use cases uh we used like our integration between Equinex and um the their cloud exchange right toget to the cloud providers. Um and then on top of that we use our expertise around NetApp solutions to help build a foundation from a training standpoint. We build a custom training for the customers specific to ONAP or specific to FSX for ONAP and help lay a groundwork for you know those infrastructure teams to go in with a new technology to go in witha new storage platform but be able to manage it and manage it you know from day one. So worldwide did that forthe customer.
The speed at which data can be analyzed and transformed to produce high-value outcomes creates incremental value, enabling them to manage, protect, and move data seamlessly via hybrid and multicloud solutions is the new standard for IT.