TechONTAPPodcast

Super Bowl 50 is just around the corner, and that means the Denver Broncos, who are also NetApp customers, have the opportunity to once again hoist the Vince Lombardi trophy.

Earlier this year, we had the opportunity to sit down with Russ Trainor, VP of IT for the Denver Broncos, Val Bercovici, and Cynthia Stoddard to discuss how NetApp has helped the team overcome their IT challenges and once again, make it to the big game.

This week NetApp finalized its acquisition of SolidFire, and we can’t wait to get started talking about it! To kick off our dive into SolidFire, we welcome longtime NetApp employee Andy Grimes, Principle Architect for Flash, who has been working closely with SolidFire since NetApp announced its intent to acquire the company. Andy brings his knowledge of SolidFire’s technology and business to the podcast to discuss how the two technologies differ, their similarities, and how the new acquisition fits within NetApp’s flash portfolio. Whether you’re a customer, partner, or NetApp employee, this episode of the podcast will give you an overview of the all the latest news and a preview of everything to come.

OpenStack is one of those technologies that many people have heard of, but don’t perhaps fully understand. What is it intended for? Who uses it? Why do enterprise IT organizations value it so much? Is it as hard as some say?

In the latest edition of the NetApp Tech ONTAP podcast, you’ll find the answers to these and other questions. This week, we are joined by two of the best and brightest technical marketing engineers from NetApp's OpenStack team, Jeff Applewhite and Akshai Parthasarathy, for a frank discussion about OpenStack, clouds (private and otherwise), orchestration and everything in between.

StorageGRID Webscale is NetApp’s object data storage system. Recently version 10.2 was released and added a number of new and interesting features. To enlighten us, we asked none other than Duncan Moore, Director for StorageGRID at NetApp, to visit us and give us a breakdown. As always, Duncan does a great job extolling the benefits of object storage, so if you’re curious about object storage and it’s use cases, give this episode a listen!

With Glenn away, Justin and Andrew wanted to take the opportunity to playback some of their best interviews of Insight 2015. Tune in and listen as the guys sit down with Dave Hitz, NetApp's co-founder, Cynthia Stoddard, NetApp's CIO, and much more.

For the first episode of 2016 we talk about the year past: the good, the bad, and everything in-between. We reminisce about all the fun we’ve had so far, beg for some feedback from our listeners, and at least one of us refuses to make any predictions for 2016.

On the eve of this year’s holiday season, we received quite the stocking stuffer when the news broke that NetApp plans to acquire SolidFire. Tune into this week’s podcast for all the latest news!

Also on this week’s show, we have some great interviews from NetApp Insight 2015. First, we sat down with Antonio Pittalis, IT Infrastructure Manager for Tiscali, to learn more about how Tiscali is benefiting from its adoption of the hybrid cloud. Then later, we talk hyper-converged with Craig Chadwell, Product Manager for NetApp, and Mike Laverick, VMware.

For our episode this week, we sit down with the group again, Evan Miller, Enterprise Architect for NetApp, Eduardo Rivera, Storage Architect for NetApp, and Stetson Webster, Storage Architect for NetApp. This week’s focus is on data protection being integrated with the storage services offerings. Protecting data is a critical function of any infrastructure, and working with the application administrators to clearly define a set of requirements early is key to ensuring success. The NetApp IT team talks to us about their experience with evaluating the needs of our applications and how they can more effectively provide protection while also keeping cost controlled.

IT departments across all industries are trying to figure out how to become service providers to their own businesses, and storage is no exception to this. Designing storage services which are capable of meeting the needs of the applications which your organization uses is critical to ensuring success. For our episode this week we sit down with Evan Miller, Enterprise Architect for NetApp, Eduardo Rivera, Storage Architect for NetApp, and we welcome back Stetson Webster (@stetsonwebster), Storage Architect for NetApp. Eduardo and Stetson are the storage architects for NetApp IT, also known as Customer 1, and they recently went through a Storage Services Design Workshop with Evan and his team. The result has been nothing less than phenomenal, resulting in appropriately sized storage systems which deliver improved services, balancing capacity and performance, and reduced overall cost for storage services.

With SMB 3.0., Microsoft changed the game for how applications like SQL and Hyper-V could be deployed. Continuously available file shares allow organizations to deploy business critical workloads with all the performance and availability traditionally associated with block based storage (iSCSI/FCP), but with the ease of use of a file share. Microsoft and NetApp have been partnering for years to provide enterprise class file storage. Clustered Data ONTAP’s implementation of SMB is the best iteration yet.

On this week’s pre-recorded episode, the guys hop into a time bubble with Marc Waldrop to discuss all things SMB – starting with answering the age old, often debated question “CIFS or SMB?”. The guys leave no stone unturned. If you work in or around Microsoft products in any way, then you should check out this episode!