Grey Beards on Systems - 63: GreyBeards talk with NetApp A-Team members John Woodall & Paul Stringfellow

Episode Date: June 20, 2018

Sponsored by NetApp: In this episode, we talk with NetApp A-Team members John Woodall (@John_Woodall), VP Eng, Integrated Archive Systems and Paul Stringfellow (@techstringy), Technical Dir.  Data Management Consultancy, Gardner Systems Plc. Both John and Paul have been NetApp partners for quite awhile (John since the beginning of NetApp). John and Paul work directly with … Continue reading "63: GreyBeards talk with NetApp A-Team members John Woodall & Paul Stringfellow"

Hey everybody, Ray Lucchese here with Howard Marks here. Welcome to the next, another sponsored episode of the Greybeards on Storage monthly podcast show where we get Greybeards storage assistant bloggers to talk with storage assistant vendors to discuss upcoming products, technologies, and trends affecting the data center today. This Graybeards on Storage podcast is brought to you today by NetApp and was recorded on June 15, 2018. We have with us here today Paul Stringfellow, Tech Director of Gardner Systems, and John Woodall, VP of Engineering for Integrated Archive Systems. Both of them are members of the NetApp A team. Paul and John, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and the NetApp A team? You're further away, Paul. I'll let you go first. Yeah, thanks. So I'm the Brit's voice on this week's show. But yeah, my name is Paul Stringfellow.

I'm Technical Director for a data management consultancy business here in the UK, Gardner Systems. I've worked in the IT industry around 20 years and over the last four or five worked almost exclusively on helping customers to build data management strategies. That includes everything from how to get the best out of their data platforms, how to manage the data that they have, into building things like compliance programs, data leak prevention strategies, and the future of how they use their data. So, you know, using artificial intelligence, machine learning, etc. And as you mentioned, yeah, I'm very pleased to be a member of the NetApp A team, a group of advocates of about 25 strong, based globally, and we work very closely with NetApp in ensuring that both the NetApp message that they're producing and the products and services they're producing

match the kind of customer requirements that we hear as people kind of out in the field and on the ground. So yeah, that's kind of what I do and a little bit about being part of the A-team. Well, I've got all sorts of A-team questions, but let's let John introduce himself first. Thank you. Good morning, I guess, in my time zone. John Woodall, VP of Engineering and Integrated Archive Systems. I think we have the dubious maybe honor of being

NetApp's first partner. So we've had a long-term partnership with NetApp. Like Paul, deal with customers every day. That's my favorite aspect of what I do is actually talking to end user customers because that's where reality is. Before being on the vendor side, I was in a variety of tech companies in various roles in IT. So understand the practitioner side as well as the partner sell in and with side. And also a member of the A-team is noted, which sounds like you have some questions. So we'll hold off on any further comments until there's...

Well, you know, many vendors have their various tags they apply to folks like us, you know, from Vexpert to all sorts of, to, you know, NetApp United, which, you know, they send me some swag every once in a while. It's not a job, it's a wardrobe. Yeah, nobody's ever sent pants. But what's the difference between a recognition program like United or VXpert or Cisco Champions and an advocacy program like A-Team? That's a great question. I think for me, one of the things I've

noticed, and I work with a couple of other vendors in similar programs, but the 18 program seems relatively unique in one that is relatively small. It is kept relatively small to around 25 members, and it does work extremely closely. I think it gets some really good access into very senior decision makers within NetApp. So we once a year head over to Sunnyvale, to NetApp's HQ to run what we call, it's named the ETL event, but it's basically a kind of a two way briefing. So it's NetApp's senior product managers, senior executives, giving us a little bit of insight into where NetApp are heading and the kind of strategic messages. And we did some really interesting stuff this year on some quite long term vision stuff, you know, kind of like that five, six, seven years out, which, as you guys know, in the storage industry is an extremely long time. Two generations. Yeah, well, it is. And I think it gives us a really good opportunity to not only, as John was saying before,

the idea that actually working with customers every day is probably the thing that keeps us, you know, keeps us excited, keeps us interested in what the industry and where it's heading. But it gives us that opportunity to take feedback that we're hearing from customers, the things, the real challenges that they're seeing, and map that to what NetApp are talking about. Because what I'm always interested in when I'm working with a vendor is, is that vendor saying the kind of things that my customers are saying to me? Are they dealing with the problems that I'm seeing on the ground day to day and And the things that those customers are worried about for one, two, three years time. So I think that kind of relatively small team that is, it allows us to have a much better, closer interaction with the vendor

than perhaps something like a VXPair. You know, I'm not on the VXPair program, so I don't want to comment too much about it, but something that seems a little bit wider and maybe is just a way of filling out your wardrobe. Wardrobe. Swag. Yeah, I would characterize it just to add on that I think it is a small group. The group doesn't change. There's not an annual election process. It's kind of once you're tagged and appointed or

given the opportunity to join the A-team, you're in the team as long as you either want to be or as long as you're not working for a competitor. That's kind of the high-level cutoff. So like a federal judge, it's a lifetime appointment? It can be. It can be in terms of professional years and career, yes. As long as you're not on a competitive organization, then you are a member of the A-team. That's very interesting. I was an MVP for Microsoft for a while. It didn't take them too long to get rid of me. But it was certainly not a lifetime. But the MVP is a major, major

endeavor. I mean, I've got to believe there are thousands of MVPs out there and stuff like that, maybe even tens of thousands. It's just amazing. Well, I think that to believe there are thousands of MVPs out there and stuff like that, maybe even tens of thousands. It's just amazing. Well, I think that kind of size of the program as well. And the fact, as John said, there isn't an ongoing re-registration program. I think what we do see the other way, though, is that that program is like that because there's a level of commitment both ways as well. NetApp committing to presenting to us, making sure senior executives are available to us, making sure that we get some insight into what's coming and what's coming both in the immediate future and something a little bit further out. But from our point of view as well, there is a level of commitment from us as well, is the attending those events. So for me,

for John, it's not such a big trip to go into Sunnyvale. But for me, it's quite a long way. And so there is a commitment that way. There's a commitment around getting involved in things at the NetApp Tech Conference Insights for those who've attended that in the past. So there is much more of a two-way commitment than I see in some of the other programs that I'm part of. I don't know how that compares, Ray, with MVP. But I think for some of those programs, it's a matter of being a part of it and and you benefit from being a part of it because you've done you know maybe you've blogged or you've been an influencer elsewhere but i think there's a much more of a a two-way not a demand you know it i think it's always a lot of those activities are always optional but

there is a bit of an expectation that you know netapp are prepared to give plenty their way it's up for us to give and whether that that's not just about writing blogs and you know, NetApp are prepared to give plenty their way. It's up for us to give back. And whether that's not just about writing blogs and, you know, engaging on social media, but that's equally about making sure that we're giving feedback into NetApp as a company as well. So, John, you've been with the company for a long, long time. How long has their team been around? I think it's a little over five years, Paul, if I remember right. Yeah, I think it is five, six years. I've been on the team about three and a half.

So, yeah, it certainly came before I did. Yeah, because it's a lifetime appointment and a small group, I assume it's invitation only. Correct. Okay. Well, I think I get A-Team. And as members of the A-Team, you guys are prepared to talk about other things NetApp.

What's your take on data fabric? Clearly such things become very interesting. And in your introductions, both of you guys talked more about data than storage, which we're always glad to hear. But what's the state of that? How much more do we have to do? Will the high thread count data fabric ever stop being woven? I don't know.

But I think of it, because I think there's a lot of the hashtag data something or other. If you follow NetApp social media, you know, data fabric, data driven, data thriver, data visionary, etc. And at the end of the day, I think they all have their place. Data fabric, I personally think of as it's a context. It's like air traffic control. I don't think of getting on a plane and flying across the country about what has to happen for that to be a safe, predictable experience for me and other travelers. But there's a lot that's happening in the background as that flight goes east to west or what have you. Similarly, I think a data fabric provides a logical and real construct where it's an optimized experience. So from a storage perspective, data reduction technologies make it as an optimized experience as the data allows. It's future start talking about data fabric, the context in my mind is, it's not just on-prem. That's been the easy bit. It's the, how do you extend these same data management constructs and capabilities into public cloud in a hybrid or multi-cloud context? And in

that sense, I think data fabric is partly here, and it will always be having to be extended because data will end up being in different places that aren't envisioned today or capable today. But customer control has to be the number one tenant of the data fabric, and that's the ability for my customer, for example, to control, I need more agility. So I'm going to leverage, you know, pick a cloud that has what I need as a service to get that maybe time to value, time to market addressed. But over time, cloud can become, for resident workloads, as we've seen people comment on frequently, an expensive proposition. So having the ability to dial back the cost piece and balance cost and agility per workload, if you will, is something that I think is an incredibly valuable tenant of the data fabric design or design center. And in that sense, I think NetApp has a vision around

and it being an enabler to allow customers to place their data wherever it makes the most sense for their business and then move that or change those attributes as needed. So it's a bit of a high level concept. You know, the initial foray uses SnapMirror as a transport protocol, but, you know, that's not necessarily the only way to move data in a Fabric context. And I would say that longer term, you have to think non-NetApp endpoints in the Data Fabric. I'm not giving away anything, by the way. That's just the way I think conceptually, whether I was an AT member or NetApp person or not, it's if I think of this construct of a data fabric, I need it to address, you know, from a NetApp perspective, let's take

care of our own stuff first. That makes sense. But over time, let's make sure that we're inclusive of other people who maybe haven't made that choice previously, but allow them to begin to get onto a data fabric context so that they can get the benefits of it. Yeah, I think everything John, yeah, I wholly agree with everything John said. It was interesting when Howard in the introduction to that question said that I think for both myself and John, we both spoke about data as a much bigger concept than storage. And I think for us, that's where data fabric really sat. We'd already started talking with our customers prior to netapp starting to use the phrase data fabric about a much bigger picture to the way

they looked after data than just the spindles or just the storage array that it would sit on and i think that's the important part for us for data fabric because what it's allowed us to do when we're talking about storage and whether we're talking to a customer about netapp storage or data in general that has allowed us to open up that conversation because I think in modern business, the way they look after their data is so much more than where they place that data. It's all of the things John's just talked about. It's how do I move that data around? How do I make sure that data is secure? We get lots of, here in the UK and as part of the EU, obviously, we get lots of questions around data compliance. It's been a big driver for companies over the last 18 months, two years. All of those things

aren't driven by necessarily the storage platform that sits underneath it. It's about the much bigger piece that you wrap around it. It's the tools that give you insight into that data. It's how do I manage that if I'm moving that into a service provider, if I'm moving that into a hyperscaler, how do I continue to manage that? So I think in two ways, the data fabric conversation that NetApp have had and that kind of long-term strategy about making sure there's a consistency of storage experience, regardless of the location of that data, that's absolutely crucial, I think, to a modern business who's planning how they use their data long term and how they how they build hybrid environments that are going to use cloud that are going to use third-party vendors that might have stuff sat on that's virtualized stuff that sits on an appliance they want a

consistency of experience but not just to make their lives easier from a management point of view but to make their lives easier in terms of the way they you know they manage that day-to-day build compliance they build security and longer term about how they start to integrate those kind of far off concepts that we all like to talk about, AI, machine learning, how do I start to have my data set in the right place at the right time? So for us, data fabric's been absolutely key in the conversation we've had with our customers to say, this is not just about where that data sits, this is not about just storing it, this is about a much bigger concept that talks about what you're going to do with that data sits this is not about just storing it this is about a much bigger concept that talks about what you're going to do with that data long term and that just

allows us as working with customers day to day to be able to open up a much wider conversation that allows us to delve into much bigger areas of what they're doing as a business and I think that's been hugely valuable and has probably played quite a big part in NetApp success over the last three or four years. I think, you know, none of us are kidding ourselves that NetApp of five years ago is not the NetApp that all of us are seeing today. And they certainly were not having the conversations that we have today. The other question I had, there was a, you know, we had this cloud data volume discussion with Aki here a couple of weeks back, but the whole, you know, the whole push into the cloud and being,

I'll call it almost NetApp native in the cloud is kind of unusual in this environment today. You guys want to talk a little bit about that? I mean, the cloud data volume is an interesting solution, but it's just one of many that they have out there. You know, cloud volumes is actually one of the more significant things I think NetApp has chosen to do. I think they realize that not everyone's an on-tap customer, but everyone can benefit in the cloud, if you will, from enterprise proven file services that perform well. And I think cloud volumes, and I saw the, I think it was Cloud Field Day, one of the tech field days where eki presented yeah and it's i i watched that and i've spoken with him this isn't your father's net app anymore right it's it's i see people wrestle

with netapp's identity with all of these developments in and around hybrid and multi-cloud native um you know console level file services that can just be easily consumed. And they don't have to know about storage virtual machines and, and the things that, that go with on tap, even though way down underneath it's it's on tap. They've, they've hidden the mechanics of that. And they presented, you need a hundred terabytes. I think there's a video out there showing an eight second deployment for a

hundred terabytes. Look, it's actually the storage as a service. It really is. And so, but this is NetApp. They sell stuff that goes in my data center, but they're laying out, I think, back to the data fabric context, where and how people consume resources is changing. I think of, you know, the tools and things that were available early in my career, cloud was not one of them. But to an architect today who's got a problem to solve for their business or an opportunity to create a new monetary stream from something they're we need IO traces, which are enormous files, one record in a CSV for every IO the system did. And I tried setting up Hadoop in the lab and gave up and we just processed that stuff in EMR. Because Elastic

MapReduce is so much easier. Yeah. You want that iPhone-like experience, the smartphone, if you're not an apple user some of us run windows but even i have an iphone yeah yeah some of us are hybrid users here there is there is no there is no mac here i'm just telling you there's no mac anywhere no ios anywhere in my office oh god so paul do you actually run windows phone is that why is that why you're so happy to hear from mark? Of course. Yeah, I'm waiting for some more of those apps. But I mean, actually, just to pick up on what you guys are saying there, I think that the thing around cloud volumes, a NetApp's bigger cloud piece, you know, so whether it's cloud volumes, whether it's SaaS backup, you know, whether it's on-tap cloud that you can just take natively out of AWS or the Azure marketplace. I think what's important

in there is that I think like all companies, you have some kind of, even if your cloud strategy is not to use the cloud, it's a strategy, isn't it? And I think in NetApp's case, they recognized they needed a cloud strategy. I know when we were in Sunnyvale a few weeks back, one of the things Dave Hitz talked about that I thought was really interesting was that NetApp have made this movement to look at how they can utilize cloud as a storage vendor, but they didn't jump in there thinking, look how we can make money out of cloud. What they said was, look how that can potentially add value to us. They didn't go into that thinking there's money to be made in their clouds. I think they looked at that and said, is the value, is this something that we can do as a data company, as a data storage company?

Is there something that cloud can bring to us that, you know, we can't do if we just continue to focus on building great products on-prem? And I think that that kind of needing that cloud strategy. And I think what's really interesting is if you look at, and I was looking at some numbers yesterday from i i forget who the um i forget who the analyst company were but they were talking about looking at the all flash array market and it's interesting that that netapp and emc are absolutely still or netapp and dell so he's still still kind of one and two in that market as they have been for probably the last seven or eight years and what i think what's quite interesting what netapp are looking at now is that they they firmly believe that that cloud strategy that they've got is playing a huge part in driving that on-prem success that they're having.

Because their cloud strategy just doesn't include those native cloud apps that you were talking about, but includes integrating cloud storage directly into their on-prem architecture. So tools, things like fabric pools, plug straight into your on-prem production storage and give you a back off to an S3 object store, but sits as part of your primary storage. And I think that's really, I was sat with a global customer in the last week and they were talking about exactly that, how do I start to integrate cloud into this on-prem and that NetApp stuff that you've talked to us about

for the last two or three years, that real interesting and for me that that's the thing that gives validation to to the kind of way NetApp are doing is validation of what NetApp are doing is not when I think it's a good idea it's when my customers come to me and say that stuff's real smart we can build that into what we're doing you know and I think NetApp have been ahead of the market in that certainly in having a having and now have a really mature and interesting cloud strategy. And I think there is definitely NetApp, a cloud company, sat in there somewhere. But I don't think I'll ever be NetApp exclusively a cloud company. I think it's all about how they add value to what we already do with our data on-prem. So I think

it's a really interesting shift. And I think it's something that NetApp have delivered really, really well. God, you know, I was at a dinner, oh gosh, must've been a couple of years back. It was probably three or four years back. And it was NetApp dinner. And I was talking about how the cloud was going to effectively, it looked like at the time it was going to destroy the storage industry. And this NetApp exec said, hey, you know, either you go after it or you don't. You can let it kill you off or you can go after it and see what you can do with it to make it work for you. And this guy was optimistic, to say the least. And this was four or five years ago when the cloud looked like, gosh.

That was when we were going to tear down all our data centers next week. Yeah. Like we have done. Everybody's all in in the cloud, aren't they? But I remember a similar thing, Ray. I remember sitting in a meeting with Microsoft before they launched what was at the time business productivity online.

So the thing that came before Office 365. Sat in a room with a whole bunch of partners here in the UK saying that we're going to go down this route and a whole bunch of partners saying you can't do that, Microsoft. It's going to kill your channel. I'm sat there thinking you do know Microsoft are doing this regardless don't you this is going to happen and either you you know as you're saying there either you embrace it and

make it part of your business or you wither on the vine and go and find something else to do yeah I mean I think of the cloud and the impact and it's still in I think relative terms my opinion is it's still very early in how cloud is maturing, the use cases, the adoption. I think NetApp has been smart. If you look at a lot of what I call agenda-based messaging that different companies have, that's fair. Everybody has to put their best foot forward.

At the end of the day, I think NetApp has done a good job of saying it's not an either or for cloud. It's a both and. You're going to, the customer, use the resources that make sense for your business. We, NetApp, in this case, want to make sure that we have a way to optimize and enhance that experience that you think is worth the time and money to work with us to achieve. And cloud-based storage has been there, but relative to either on-prem or even cloud volumes now, has been more expensive, has been slower,

and less feature-rich in terms of simple things that you don't even... I mean, early on with NetApp, the typical sales cycle was, let's talk to you about how our snapshots are different and better than the competitions. And they were. Well, that's easy if you're comparing snapshots to EBS snapshots are different and better than the competitions. And they were. Well, that's easy if you're comparing snapshots to EBS snapshots. Correct. And so it's funny, maybe some things, you know, kind of go through cycles as well.

But, you know, in an on-prem discussion, nobody talks about snapshots. It's a given. It's just like it's table stakes. But the cloud hasn't gotten there yet. And so cloud volumes and, you know, ONTAP cloud and NPS and all the various ways to consume either native or near to the cloud NetApp storage products, just take a lot of those things off the table and allow the customer to focus on why are they using the resource to begin with. Don't let the resource consumption or configuration get in the way of the benefit of it. And so I think that's where cloud volumes clearly differentiates. And I think as we get into the end of the year, when the private previews end and it goes GA

and begins to see broader adoption, it's going to be really interesting to watch, I think, how people, how my customer use it. I have many customers who are very interested in different use cases with cloud volumes where maybe ONTAP cloud wasn't their first choice. So we'll see. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So this is a good place to terminate here. Howard, any last questions for Paul or John? Well, I'm not so sure about the word terminate, but other than that, no. And the podcast. Thank you. Sorry.

Yeah, I was saying, I just came on a podcast. I didn't expect termination at the end. Arnold is coming. All right, all right, all right. Jesus. It's a hard audience. Howard? Yes? Questions?

Well, the only other thing, the only other question I had was, what experience have you guys seen with NetApp's HCI solution? It's an interesting architecture, and I'm kind of curious to see how customers are accepting it. Yeah, so I think HCI is in a really interesting place at the moment. And this is just the Paul Stringfellow view of the HCI market, not based on anything other than my head. But I think if you take a look back over the last maybe two, three years, as that market's grown, that one of the things that I think initially came out of that market was the idea that all I'm really doing is taking big infrastructure and squeezing it into a small box. There's some things around simplification, et cetera, but I don't think there was an awful lot there about let's do something

differently in the way that we deliver our business. Now, let's look at this giving us some different business outcomes. I think what's happened in the meantime is that companies like VMware, companies like Microsoft with Azure Stack have started to come along and build software platforms that start to give you a better business delivery mechanism for your applications and your services. And they're now looking for hardware that they can drop those software stacks on that's going to take advantage of what they're doing. And I think you're seeing that now in a shift. And what NetApp have done with their HCI platform is absolutely take care of some of the challenges that you were seeing with the traditional vendors in that we were very much tied to compute and storage being one thing. Scale was potentially a problem. I

think NetApp opening some of those things up so that they can scale those things more separately, I think for me at least, sits there alongside the way that businesses want to grow their architecture. They don't want to just, if they want more storage, they don't want to have to buy more compute. So I think in lots of cases to just, if they want more storage, they don't want to have to buy more compute. So I think in lots of cases for us, certainly in our market here, that we were seeing that kill HCI projects pretty much stone dead

is that customers were looking at that and saying, I've just bought some compute. I don't want to buy more compute. I just want some storage. And so that architecture shift, I think plays well with what's, in my opinion, has been a big shift from software vendors starting to make HCI a lot more attractive and are now looking for the right kind of hardware platforms to sit underneath it.

So I think NetApp are getting into that market in a real good time and have probably addressed some of the issues that we saw holding back HCI adoption probably early on. Yeah, I would agree. I think from what I see in my install base of existing HCI customers is, you know, it solved the problem of simplicity and it depended really on who the target buyer or audience were as to how attractive. But, you know, HCI added real value and simplicity. If you look at the statistics, it's a fast-growing segment of the market. So, you know, not getting into that is something from a business perspective that I don't think NetApp would be wise to have ignored.

But if I look at their value proposition, what they would refer to, I think, as a Gen 2 HCI versus Gen 1, you know, for the core data center, tier one apps, co-mingled, a customer wanting to have the same ease of deployment, administration, and scale that a traditional HCI platform offers, but then running into architectural limitations due to shared core architectures. We've seen that become problematic with legacy HCI products, where I think NetApp's opportunity is really more, not so much at the edge or department level, but at the core data center where the way that their platform is

architected gives them high performance from a storage layer, gives them granular scalability, gives them an easy admin setup experience. So I expect them to do well. It does perform well. We've got a number of active opportunities that we're pursuing. But like everything changes, I think the market was well-defined, but I think the demands that customers have placed on it because it did, the legacy products have done so well. I think there's an opportunity for NetApp to carve out a

value proposition in the core data center that will be tough for some people to match. All right. Well, this has been great. Thank you very much, Paul and John, for being on our show today. Thanks, Nenna, for sponsoring this podcast. Next month, we'll talk to another system storage technology person. Any questions you want us to ask, please let us know. And if you enjoy our podcast, tell your friends about it and please review us on iTunes as this will also help get the words out. That's it for now. Bye, Howard. Bye, Ray. Good day, gents.