Tech ONTAP Podcast Episode 400 – NetApp Launch Announcements February 2025
Summary by ChatGPT
Insights and Technologies at NetApp: ASA, ARP AI, BlueXP, and E-Series Capacity
John Woodall and Justin Parisi kick off the conversation by discussing cyber resiliency, where they emphasize the importance of ARP AI and its role in data protection. BlueXP comes up as a key tool to help customers simulate attacks, run readiness drills, and test their disaster recovery capabilities without disrupting production data. The ability to simulate a cyber attack and then test the recovery process is crucial for organizations to identify gaps in their defense strategies. Pedro Couto shares that BlueXP is becoming increasingly valuable for managing multiple clusters across sites and cloud environments. It offers a unified management experience across on-premises and cloud infrastructures, helping customers with backup operations and ensuring autonomous ransomware protection.
The conversation continues to highlight BlueXP’s classification features, which enable better data governance by identifying files with personal information or compliance risks like GDPR. This capability can drastically improve ransomware recovery and compliance reporting by giving administrators the ability to generate reports with a single click, which is especially useful in highly regulated regions like Germany.
Then the discussion moves to the Workload Factory in BlueXP, a tool that helps customers optimize their cloud spend by testing workloads in the cloud before fully migrating. Oliver Fuckner and John Woodall discuss the tool’s ability to simulate different workloads, ensuring that organizations are making the most cost-efficient and performance-optimized decisions as they move from on-premises environments to the cloud.
ASA (On-Box Analytics) is then introduced as an essential tool for gaining deep insights into the performance and behavior of data infrastructure. John Woodall and Justin Parisi discuss how ASA comes with a variety of built-in tools like SAN analyzers, VM-to-LUN mapping, and anomaly detection. ASA enables the creation of custom dashboards, helping administrators visualize and manage data more efficiently across NetApp platforms, Cisco/Brocade switches, and VMware environments. This kind of visibility is key for preventing issues before they occur and managing workloads effectively.
Finally, the conversation moves to E-Series and its significant role in high-performance computing. Pedro Couto explains that 30TB and 60TB drives in E-Series can support massive data capacities within a compact 2U form factor, making it an excellent choice for industries like oil & gas, where seismic analysis requires fast, efficient storage. Video surveillance and radar systems also benefit from the high throughput and speed that E-Series offers. The flexibility of E-Series shines when raw capacity is more important than additional features like ONTAP. For these scenarios, E-Series delivers top-tier performance at a lower cost.
The CPOC (Customer Proof of Concept) service, which allows customers to simulate workloads on E-Series hardware, helps determine how well their data and applications will perform before committing to a solution. The ability to test performance based on real-world data ensures that customers are making the right choice for their specific needs.
Key Takeaways:
- BlueXP: A comprehensive solution for managing data across multiple environments, offering autonomous ransomware protection, backup, and powerful data classification for compliance.
- ASA On-Box Analytics: A built-in feature for SAN analysis, anomaly detection, and VM-to-LUN mapping, offering deeper insights into data and infrastructure management.
- E-Series: A powerhouse for high-performance computing, with 30TB and 60TB drives in 2U form factors, delivering raw capacity and speed for industries like oil & gas, video surveillance, and more.
Each of these technologies, when used together, provides a cohesive suite of tools for optimizing performance, ensuring data security, and improving operational efficiency across a range of industries.
Finding the podcast
You can find this week’s episode on Soundcloud here:
There’s also an RSS feed on YouTube using the new podcast feature, found here:
You can also find the Tech ONTAP Podcast on:
Transcription
The following transcript was generated using Descript’s speech to text service and then further edited. As it is AI generated, YMMV.
Episode 400 – NetApp Launch Announcements February 2025
===
Justin Parisi: This week on the Tech ONTAP Podcast, we bring in the NetApp A-Team to talk about all the latest and greatest updates for the February 11th NetApp launch.
Podcast intro/outro: [Intro]
Intros
—
Justin Parisi: Hello and welcome to the TechONTAP Podcast. My name is Justin Parisi. I’m here in the basement of my house and with me today I have the NetApp A-Team to talk about the latest and greatest releases and features that are available in the announcement we’re doing this month. With us today, we have John Woodall. So John, what do you do these days?
John Woodall: Well, , it’s funny that you mentioned that because I’ve managed to check off the NetApp trifecta, the hat trick. I was at one point a customer for many years, a partner, and now I’m in day seven of NetApp employment.
It’s awesome.
Justin Parisi: Yes, John is now a member of the family, La Familia.
John Woodall: La Familia.
Justin Parisi: So John, if we wanted to reach you these days, how do we do that?
John Woodall: Well, you still can reach me on social, on X @John_Woodall. And that’d probably be the best way for the larger audience to get a hold of me.
Justin Parisi: All right. Also with us today, we have André Unterberg.
Andre Unterberg: Yeah. I’m a solution architect at a partner of NetApp, SVA system for Trip Alexander.
And I’m with NetApp for 14 years now. And member of the A-Team and happy to be your guest in this podcast today.
Justin Parisi: Happy to have you. Also with us, Pedro Couto is here today.
Pedro Couto: It’s a pleasure to be here. I can be found @PedroCoutoTech in X. And also on LinkedIn. I’m architect for storage at Vortex in Brazil, and it’s really a pleasure to be here. I’m a long time listener from your podcast.
Justin Parisi: Do Neto from Brazil?
Pedro Couto: Yes, I do. He’s a friend of mine. And he was really happy to know that I’m here and he’s also on the opening of the show, right?
He is, he is.
Justin Parisi: Is he a national hero? Is he like, an icon in Brazil?
Pedro Couto: He is my hero, yes.
Justin Parisi: Are they going to replace the big statue over Rio with Neto?
Pedro Couto: Yeah, I wish they could.
Justin Parisi: Alright also here with us, Oliver Fuckner. So, Oliver, what do you do and how do we reach you?
Oliver Fuckner: Hi, my name is Oliver. I’ve been a NetApp customer for more than 20 years and in my current role, I do Metrocluster and I do StorageGRID for a German bank company. And we are customers of the SVA from Andre and we are currently expanding massively on StorageGRID. That’s not the topic today, but hardware is always what I like best.
A-Team stories
—
Justin Parisi: That’s right. Oliver geeks out on hardware over there, so he’s our hardware guy. He will talk about the latest updates for that in the launch. All right, so we mentioned the A-Team briefly and let’s talk a little bit more about the A-Team in case people are not aware.
So the, A-Team of course, is club. So a group of people who are passionate about NetApp. They want to talk about NetApp, but they aren’t necessarily employees of NetApp. Sometimes they’re partners, sometimes they’re customers like Oliver. And then, of course, sometimes they’re customers slash partners slash employees like John. So, Pedro, I think you’re one of the newer members, if I’m not mistaken. Tell us a little bit about how you came to find the A-Team.
Pedro Couto: I entered the A-Team in September in Insight. That was my biggest goal. I think it was a big dream, a long time dream.
And I always try to share my love that I have with NetApp instructing customers in administration classes. So last year I had more than 100 students in Brazil. It’s a Portuguese classes for NetApp administration. That’s the way I enter A-Team. Long time ago, I wrote some certifications with Andre at Colorado in NetApp.
We wrote NCDA exam. So that was where I met many A-Team members. I found Sam at Insight and she already knew me a little. Some of the A-Team members like Andre, they asked her to invite me. You need to get invited to come in. If you love NetApp, if you like to advocate for NetApp and share knowledge, you are more than welcome to join.
Justin Parisi: Did they make you scale a data center to be initiated or anything like that?
Pedro Couto: No, not really.
Justin Parisi: That’s good. It’s hazing. It’s frowned upon.
John Woodall: What happens at Insight stays at Insight.
Justin Parisi: That’s right. You scale a data center. That’s on you, bud. All right. So John is one of the older members.
We’ll go to him next. So John, how did you I don’t mean older, like age. I mean like…
John Woodall: Yeah, yeah whatever.
Justin Parisi: I mean, like as in. Time with the A-Team. So how did you come across the A-Team?
John Woodall: Well, when I was in the partner community, I was an advocate, had a lot of business with NetApp that we did, but I was active in social media and I would come over to NetApp headquarters and do sessions with different teams, marketing, product, sales on direction, strategy, just different topics and spent a lot of time here.
And, , it turns out Sam Moulton, who was the originator of the A-Team, she looks at people who are potential candidates and watches your social media behavior and blogs or whatever you may be doing for quite a while. It’s not just like you do it, there’s consistency and commitment.
And so I get a Email saying, Hey, you need to show up in Sunnyvale at the time on this day for two days. And it was the ETL, event we do in the spring as a team. And so I show up and that was my initiation. I was the only person not wearing a branded A-Team shirt and was invited to sit at the big table with the rest of the A-Team going, okay, why am I here?
And then Sam explained it on the break. And , it’s been a lot of fun ever since.
Justin Parisi: Would you say Sam is like the eye of Sauron?
John Woodall: I have a Sauron piece
Justin Parisi: Not the evil part. Maybe the eye of NetApp…
John Woodall: the eye of NetApp, yes, for sure.
Justin Parisi: It’s like a big N that’s peering over…
John Woodall: Yeah, if you take the N and you put an eye, Yeah.
Between the two legs, yeah.
Justin Parisi: She sees a NetApp blog and like, turns to the, like, Whoa!
John Woodall: Whoa, somebody called my name.
Justin Parisi: All right Oliver, tell us your A-Team story here.
Oliver Fuckner: Well, I’m A-Team member since, I don’t know, eight or nine months. I’ve been tech advisor for quite a long time, since, I don’t know, 2018 or something.
And there was the request for testing the new hardware generation that was launched in September, the larger system, the Vino series. And I had the honor to test one of the boxes. And it was very, very great to get really new shiny hardware that nobody else had seen or touched. And yeah, that was really great.
And after this, Sam convinced me to be part of the A-Team. I’ve been talking to her about the A-Team, I think Insight 2018 or 2019. I’m not exactly sure. And. Yeah, steps evolved and now I’m here.
Justin Parisi: Alright, glad to have you here. Also glad to have Andre. So Andre tell us your A-Team story.
Andre Unterberg: Oh, first of all, one does not find the A-Team, the A-Team finds you, like in the A-Team series. And yeah, I started blogging and doing some posts on Twitter or X nowadays. And one day I got an invite to A-Team called NetApp United. It was a brother of the A-Team, and two or three years later I was invited by Sam Moulton to the A-Team. And I think I’m now in the team for five, six, seven years, I don’t know, John.
Justin Parisi: Time is but a construct.
Yes. Isn’t that right, John?
John Woodall: Yeah, it’s Kairos versus Kronos, right? The moment versus the passage of time.
Justin Parisi: That’s right. All right. So , what I’m hearing here is that Sam Moulton is the person of interest when you’re talking about joining the NetApp A-Team. So there’s probably one of two ways you could go about this, right?
One is to blog or talk about NetApp and she will find you. Or you basically reach out and say, Hey, I have an interest. What do I need to do? And then she’ll give you the rundown. So Sam Moulton, you can find her on LinkedIn. I don’t really want to give her email address out because I think she might hurt me if I do that.
But yeah, just reach out to her on LinkedIn and or reach out to one of us and we can give you more information. So that said, we are here to talk about the launch, February 11th launch. Let’s start off with the hardware. So Oliver, hardware guy, What’s new?
Hardware updates
—
Oliver Fuckner: Yeah what’s new? We have the smallest FAS series now.
The FAS was expanded by the FAS 50 based on the smaller two rack unit systems. And we have the ASA series launched. We have the smaller ASA series. This is the same as we have before the AFF series, but with a different licensing model for ASA and yeah, they are the smaller block series.
And the E-Series is completely new with QLC Flash and the E4000 controller, which has also already been shipped in the StorageGRID systems.
Justin Parisi: So when you say smallest system, is it like, Zoolander small, like the little tiny phone?
Oliver Fuckner: No, no. It’s two rack units for two controllers.
So we have two horizontal controllers. Yeah. And two rack units. You have four slots for expansion, for networking, for storage shelves, for NVME, whatever you want. The CPUs are newer. You have DDR5, you have PCI Express in a newer generation. You have, More performance per rack unit, you have less power consumption, you have QAT compression built in, so you do not have performance penalty when doing data compression.
Anything that uses compaction or saves less data on the disks than you have before.
Justin Parisi: Okay. So John, as a salesperson or, , as your partner life, how would you position each of those types of systems? What are you going to tell your customers? Hey, , this is why you want X, Y, or Z.
John Woodall: If I look at any given customer. , on the FAS 50, you get, I think it’s, , 30 to 50 percent more performance. You get a smaller footprint than its targeted system and you get all the goodness of, , 9.16 and in terms of how storage is presented at the low end, and a great price point.
I think I’ve, I’ve seen in some of the documentation, street price as low as 25k as a starting point. So, for small medium companies, , I think that’s a really good starting point. When you get into the mid range of the ASA, I think that’s a sweet spot for a lot of customers. They don’t need necessarily millions of IOPS.
Although with Flash, it’s not too hard to hit, , high IO levels. It’s a good consolidation play. It’s a good refresh. If you’re running legacy block storage, it’s a great opportunity to get onto a more flexible platform. It’s a good opportunity to take advantage of some of the other ONTAP goodness. One of which might be ARP AI, which we can talk about separately. And then, we already refreshed the high end earlier in October of last year.
The EF, I think it hits a new price point with QLC Flash, better density great performance maybe not sub millisecond latency, but an awesome, fit for many, many workloads that come to mind.
Justin Parisi: Pedro, out of the hardware announcements that you’re seeing, what stands out the most to you?
Pedro Couto: Well, I like to see the EF series with capacity flash.
Here in Brazil, mostly in Sao Paulo, many customers use colocations data centers. So they are charging for the size of the solution, the rack space. You can consolidate many rack units from legacy storage on those controllers.
Justin Parisi: It’s interesting to think about different geographies and different landscapes and what would be useful for each.
Right. So, in Brazil, it’s a very large country where there’s a lot of rainforest and it’s tougher to get lines run everywhere. Right. You have to have more dispersed data centers. You can’t really just stick them in a row. And then when you look at somewhere like the States where you have tons of flat land, and maybe it becomes a little easier. Germany, a lot of MetroCluster. You don’t see a MetroCluster in a lot of other places because everything’s a little closer, right?
You can actually get away with it. So it’s pretty interesting to hear about all the different international aspects to the storage landscapes. So Andre, on that point what stands out to the German customers when you think about these hardware announcements?
Andre Unterberg: So for me the smaller systems introduced today are completing the product line of the ASA A series.
We now have the entry level platforms with the ASA A20, the A30, and the A50. And in Germany, we have a saying it is called, it is a bread and butter machine. So it’s perfectly for small and medium businesses having like 50 or 100 virtual machines and only doing blocks, then these models are a perfect fit.
Justin Parisi: So Oliver, back to you with the ASA platforms, are you currently running any of those or evaluating any of those?
Oliver Fuckner: We are not an Block company. We have two different storage departments internally. We are the IP storage guys. We do S3, we do NFS, and we do CIFS and we have the other storage group that does the block storage.
And they do not think about evaluating the ASA series, but I think we should tell them how great it is.
Justin Parisi: Yeah, I think you should. I think you should send this episode. Hey block guys, you should do ASA. There, I helped you. They’ll totally listen to me random storage guy. So let’s talk a little bit more about some of the ASA improvements. I know that they’ve added Basically what’s called a boot media, so rather than having a root volume or aggregate to handle these boots, we now have boot media to actually handle the boot up process of that. So basically you’re freeing up the disk that you could use for regular data operations.
John Woodall: It may be off storage media.
Justin Parisi: Yeah, there you go, there you go, like a USB stick, but not quite. So John, since you chimed in, what do you think about that change? Is it something that’s been long overdue?
John Woodall: Yeah, I think we brought that up in different A-Team forum and ETL meetings. There have been separate conversations I’ve had on the partner side with NetApp around, do we really need root volumes and root aggregates?
I mean, they work and they’re great. Don’t get me wrong. They serve a purpose, but is there a way to simplify that? And I think You see in the ASA this move of simplification, boot media being maybe the first in order of how to simplify the system. And then you get into additional ASA.
It’s more ONTAP, but really with the ASA, provisioning of storage is significantly simpler. So you have a storage pool and you carve out logical units or NVMe namespaces. There’s no user requirement to configure RAID groups and aggregates and volumes. You just can carve out space and present.
So, significant improvements in simplicity there from a setup and operations perspective.
Flash Forward promotion
—
Justin Parisi: There’s a flash forward promotion for ASA. Pedro, you have some familiarity with this, so what is this particular aspect of the launch?
Pedro Couto: Yeah, it was announced today that if you buy any ASA with 50 terabytes or plus, you can choose if you want three free months of support, which is amazing. Or if you want NetApp to help you migrating one petabytes of data for free included.
Justin Parisi: So if I buy a 50 terabyte ASA, they’re gonna help me migrate a petabyte of data?
John Woodall: And that’s some incredible storage efficiency.
Justin Parisi: That is crazy storage efficiency. Yeah, we’re going to just shove it all into this 50 terabytes. Keep going, we’ll find room. So the question there is then, what do you find more valuable in that scenario?
Is it the migration or is it the support?
Pedro Couto: Well, as a pre sales guy and someone who can handle a migration, I think my customer would like a free hand on the migration, but would enjoy more the three months of free support, which is an amazing add on, right? Yeah. At no price. At no cost.
Justin Parisi: And Andre, what about you, will your customers be more interested in support or the migration?
Andre Unterberg: Since I’m a service guy and doing the installations and migration by myself, I would recommend the customer takes a three month of free support because NetApp guys are taking my job.
Justin Parisi: There you go. And Oliver, as a customer, what would you take that the support or the migration?
Oliver Fuckner: I’d go for the support because we, are very serious on who can touch our data and yeah.
I’d go for the support.
Andre Unterberg: Thank you. I will send you the 50 bucks later.
Justin Parisi: We really want Andre to do our migration.
ARP AI for block
—
John Woodall: I mentioned earlier, Autonomous Ransomware Protection being pre announced for Fiscal 25 for Block, which is a significant build on top of ARP, which has been around since ONTAP 9.10 for File. So, it’s a proven technology and set of AI algorithms that are now going to be focused on looking for the signals of an attack on a block device , so stay tuned later this year.
Justin Parisi: So Andre I know this is a passion pet of yours, the ARPAI, so tell me a little bit about what you’re thinking you’d like to see out of that type of feature.
Andre Unterberg: Ah!. Finally, it is there. So every time when I was talking with customers about autonomous ransomware protection, I had to say, it’s only for file. And they were asking what about my VMware workloads? They need another solution. I will not say that NetApp anti ransomware protection is the only solution you should have, but it is the last line of defense.
And I think it’s very, very interesting to have a ransomware protection for your VMware workloads or database workloads within the storage system. And once again, it’s just the last line of defense, but as far as I know, this feature is absolutely unique in the industry at the moment.
Justin Parisi: So you say it’s the last line of defense.
What would you say your first and second and even third lines would be?
Andre Unterberg: Oh, first line, firewall, intrusion detection, et cetera, et cetera. Antivirus scanners. Security is not just one thing. It is a mix of many, many things you can do to improve your security.
And if everything else was not able to find ransomware or something like that, then the last line of defense is your NetApp storage system, which can potentially protect your ass. Sorry.
John Woodall: They’re assets.
Andre Unterberg: Yeah, that’s right.
John Woodall: Andre raises a good point. I think the last time I checked, there’s formally 17 defined categories of security products that your typical security team or CISO has to figure out what’s appropriate.
It’s thousands of products, hundreds of companies. And they do, they start at the edge. They work through the application, the user, all these things that are essential. It’s not like one thing rules them all, but the bad actors are only interested in one thing – your data. And that residing on NetApp, most secure storage platform available, now for file proven, for block pre announced, the ability to detect ransomware when it’s active and give the tools to stop its spread and to recover your data.
And so, a unique feature that complements a traditional security practice and all the tooling that they still will have. It’s not any one thing, it’s layers of depth and defense. But I think it’s a significant pre announcement that , watch this space closely because there will be more.
Justin Parisi: So is this something that’s baked into the licensing for the system or is it a separate thing that I have to purchase?
Andre Unterberg: Oh, that’s a cool thing. It is in. It’s for free with the ONTAP One licensing. You have the autonomous ransomware protection AI coming in ONTAP 9.16, as far as I know.
It is all in. So, why don’t you use it?
Justin Parisi: That is a question. Why don’t we use it? I would imagine that some people might be concerned with potential performance impacts. And from what I understand, it’s pretty minimal, if anything, for that. Are your customers using Autonomous Ransomware today?
And if so, what’s their experience with that?
Andre Unterberg: So, actually they’re using it for file, obviously. And the users didn’t even recognize that there is an anti ransomware protection underneath it. So you have microseconds of latency, not milli microseconds. And a normal user will not realize that there is a ransomware protection active.
Let’s see how NetApp will do it with block storage in the future. I’m very curious.
John Woodall: I’ve had customers upgrade their version of ONTAP because it was included, but they wanted that functionality, and specifically for ARP capabilities, being able to have that extra layer of defense, or as Andre said, the last layer of defense. It’s a very high performance environment in their case, and they have had no feedback of the negative type on performance.
It’s just been transparent to their workload and their users. So , going back to my customer days, or even partner days, or even now as a NetApp employee, the trifecta always test something before you put it in production. But I wouldn’t hesitate to look at it and deploy it as quickly as makes sense for your organization.
Justin Parisi: So Pedro, what about you? What are your thoughts?
Pedro Couto: I like it for the customers that have ONTAP ONE. But, in my perspective, NetApp is anti ransomware by design, as the snapshots, they are read only, and they cannot be deleted as the client accesses the data. So if you combine multi admin verification, which is a feature that if you try to delete volumes or snapshots, you are able to protect your snapshot, which should be your first response to a ransomware attack.
Andre Unterberg: It’s a very good point which Pedro is bringing up. Yes you have a built in security because snapshots are read only. You can have immutable snapshots in the NetApp cause SnapLock feature is also part of the ONTAP One licensing. But ARP goes a step further. It is doing a emergency snapshot when detecting a potential ransomware attack. And this are informing the administrators let’s see what that will be in the future.
John Woodall: Yeah. I liked everything Peter said, but, the multi admin verify, requiring a quorum of administrators to make any changes to a system, including what commands are run and who runs them, requiring a quorum of administrators to approve, multi factor authentication I think we get TLS 1.3, Now, in the latest release, and I do believe that the encryption algorithms are also being updated to comply to the White House mandate for quantum safe algorithms. So, when we say it’s the most secure storage platform on the planet, the receipts, if you will, are there for people to Satisfy themselves and do their diligence on the claims, and then if you peel back the covers, there’s multiple layers from the admin layer to the communication layer to the actual storage itself that allows you to give your data the most secure platform possible, but again, that’s above and beyond whatever else a customer needs to do to secure their environment.
Bad actors are very patient, and they only need to get it right once, and we don’t want them to.
Justin Parisi: So we give you ransomware to deploy in your system?
Like here, put this ransomware in your system.
Oliver Fuckner: Yes, maybe something like that. I think it’s not harmful, but I think it works the same way as real ransomware would work.
Justin Parisi: Yeah, yeah. I guess it’s like an EICAR file, like you would do with a virus scan, where it’s a harmless file that gets triggered in a ransomware attack or whatever.
John Woodall: And how easy is it to take a test drive? You go to netapp.com, click test drive, next page. expand the solutions section, and there’s cyber resilience at the top of that.
Justin Parisi: Is there a license required to drive?
John Woodall: What state are you in?
Pedro Couto: Yeah, recently I experienced a ransomware attack in an environment and the autonomous ransomware protection, it took a snapshot when the attack began and that snapshot is protected from that too. So only after the admin releases the attack as a false positive, that the snapshots becomes enabled to be deleted. So even if you let your snapshot auto delete option enabled, that snapshot will be secure. And please don’t let that option enabled because when you have a ransomware attack your volume will probably become full and your snapshots will be automatically deleted and the snapshot is the fastest restore. You can restore petabytes of data in seconds.
Justin Parisi: Yeah, interesting point where they would actually fill the volume up to force the snapshots to roll off in lieu of trying to have access to actually do that themselves. It’s pretty nefarious. Never considered that. But yeah, that’s definitely a way to do it.
So with the ransomware protection, we talked about how non impactful it is to a system, but I think there’s a little bit of extra benefit to using the ransomware protection in the form of a guarantee. So what type of guarantee are we making with the ransomware?
Andre Unterberg: So first of all, NetApp is having a ransomware recovery guarantee which guarantees you to recover from any ransomware attack. So as long as you have snapshots enabled, of course NetApp gives you a guarantee that you can recover all your data.
Justin Parisi: It’s pretty unlikely that there’d even be a need to talk about what you’d get out of a guarantee. Cause if you’re following all the required steps to get this guarantee, it’s probably never going to be an issue.
John Woodall: You’re probably in pretty good shape at that point, at least from a recoverability perspective.
Justin Parisi: Oliver as a bank, administrator. I would imagine that ransomware is top of mind for you all. Are you leveraging in your NAS environment, the autonomous ransomware protection?
Oliver Fuckner: Not yet. We are very…
Justin Parisi: are you listening to us, Oliver???
We’re saying to enable it and you’re like, no, wait, we’re not doing it.
Oliver Fuckner: Yeah, we are very, very slow in this process, but this is one of the most important topics on our list. For the 9.16 upgrade, and yes we already have multi admin verification. We have undeletable snapshots. This is a solid foundation, but ARP AI is very, very interesting for us.
Justin Parisi: We forgive you.
BlueXP
—
John Woodall: There’s one other piece to the cyber resiliency story besides ARP AI. We can’t forget our friend BlueXP, because now…
Justin Parisi: That’s where I was going next! BlueXP!
John Woodall: Oh, perfect!
Justin Parisi: Go ahead! Continue, John! Host away!
John Woodall: No problem. , simulate an attack, right do a readiness check, do drills, non disruptively to your production data. But , if I understand correctly, it’ll set up a scratch space or an area for the drill, and it’ll simulate an attack, and you can actually see how well you can detect, and then how well you can recover, because detection and prevention is one thing, but, for a cyber event, recovery is everything, and the forensic analysis of what happened, how did it get in, where might it still be dormant, all those things have to be done after you discover the attack and that can take some time. But, you know, perfect practice makes perfect. Being able to simulate an attack and simulate a recovery can test like a disaster recovery drill, your ability to run through your process, see if there’s any gaps or holes in it, so that you can, , plug them and be in the best possible position to recover.
So, Pedro, are you leveraging BlueXP for anything these days? Whether it’s backup or the autonomous ransomware protection? Or are you using it for maybe what John was talking about with the insights?
Pedro Couto: I’m seeing more customers seeking BlueXP as they have many clusters that they need to manage and on BlueXP they can manage many clusters on a single pane of glass.
Justin Parisi: So what you’re saying is the ability to manage everything in one place is valuable beyond what we’re talking about feature wise. I mean, the features are like icing on the cake, but really what they’re looking for is a way to manage everything in a simple, , easy to use interface.
Pedro Couto: That’s true. And many customers, they have many sites and they have even data on clouds. So if they use Cloud Volumes ONTAP with on premises, they can have the hybrid cloud experience, which is BlueXP, right?
Justin Parisi: So Andre, what is what are some of the features at BlueXP that your customers are really enjoying?
Andre Unterberg: Oh, backup and recovery as a service. That’s pretty much in Germany at the moment, so that you have one single pane of glass for all your NetApp backup infrastructure. You can even add your on prem storage systems to NetApp BlueXP and planning your SnapMirror, SnapVault relationships and doing backups to an S3 target or StorageGRID or whatever speaks S3 protocol like AWS, Azure, or Google. That’s pretty common in German. And yeah, let’s see how the ransomware protection from BlueXP will be consumed in Germany. At the moment, it is a add-on for the autonomous ransomware protection. Just to be clear, ARP is within the NetApp license and BlueXP ransomware protection is with extra charge per gigabyte.
Justin Parisi: Pedro, do you have something to add?
Pedro Couto: Yeah here I’m seeing also the beginning of the adoption of the BlueXP classification, which became free recently, and there are many use cases, right?
As you bring AI to your data, You need to make sure that your data is free of personal informations. And also there was released a study that said that the customers that had more governance through their data, they were more successfully able to restore after a ransomware attack. So, BlueXP classification gives you many information about your data, such as duplicated files, or files that have permissions that contains personal information.
So it’s a really valuable asset as data grows.
Justin Parisi: Yeah, absolutely.
Andre Unterberg: And it is also checking the compliance of your data. So you can check against GDPR. Very interesting for the German and Europe guys. HIPAA, I think. I think it is in some Canadian stuff. I don’t really know, and gives you one single pane of glass over all of your data. Is it top secret level? Is it about religion, sexuality content of something like that? To just have a compliance overview and you’re able to generate compliance reports just with one click. So the compliance department comes to you as an administrator and they’re asking for, hey, give me a compliance report about our data, you just click on generate report now and you get an overview what data you have.
Justin Parisi: Yeah. And I think of scale, right? So, if you think about your own laptop and how much data you have on that, which in retrospect or in comparison to what you’d have in an enterprise, isn’t a lot. But when I think about trying to organize the data on my laptop, organize the pictures, go through the files, the file names that are random that I don’t even know.
That’s a massive task just for my laptop. So if you extrapolate that out into an enterprise storage environment, it’s impossible unless you have a tool like a BlueXP.
John Woodall: Yeah. There’s a lot of value in that. It’s not just the compliance piece. It’s like how often your data is changing, how do you optimize your backup operations if data is not changing and you have it in a location where you’ve backed it up previously, why back it up again?
Justin Parisi: So also in BlueXP, we have something called the Workload Factory which sounds like, I think Willy Wonka, whenever, like a bunch of Oompa Loompas inside of your NetApp system doing all the work for you. So, in honor of Augustus Gloop Oliver, could you, could you talk about the Workload Factory?
Oliver Fuckner: I think this is just like a test lab, this is something that can do predefined Workloads with a single click, I think, where you can test your data or your setup, and then you can see if it works or not.
John Woodall: There’s a few announcements on BlueXP Workload Factory.
One is support for Cloud Shell. in AWS, so you can manage multiple ONTAP AWS machines from a single CLI. You can, for general storage purposes, enable Immutable, that’d be, or the SnapLock based Indelible. And just continuing in a progression of work with AWS expanded file type support for Bedrock.
Which various types of image text, CSV, Parquet files and then workload factor for databases. So I think SAP and Oracle are included, probably MSSQL is now being included. So, as you move from maybe on prem to AWS optimize the landing zone and drive for the right cost and configuration for that.
Justin Parisi: Yeah, it’s definitely a useful tool for customers that are trying to look at their cloud spend and see what they need to consider as they move on prem workloads into the cloud because you want to make that as efficient as possible.
John Woodall: And for the database piece, I think the key thing there is making sure that your deployment stays within best practices parameters. Over time things can drift, and so here’s a way to see how things are and guided steps to get you back in compliance, like ActiveIQ, the little tiles at the top of your screen that show you where you may have similar concept to, hey, here’s what you can do to improve, , performance, security, et cetera.
ASA on-box analytics
—
John Woodall: So it gives you insights into your data that you would not otherwise have. But since I mentioned the word insights, we can’t do justice to the ASA without talking about what else you get in the box. So, with ASA, you get data infrastructure insights that gives you a SAN analyzer, which maps your VM to your LUN, workload, topologies, anomaly detection, alerts, create your own dashboards, supports all NetApp Platforms, Cisco and Brocade Switches, and VMware.
So that comes in the box, if you will.
Justin Parisi: So, again, going back to Zoolander, is it like, it’s in the computer, and you have to break it open? Ah, yeah. Am I making Zoolander references and no one has seen this movie?
John Woodall: It’s been a while. Although if we’re going to do the wardrobe change, that’s in the movie.
Justin Parisi: Oh yeah. All right. So we’ve covered the new A series. We’ve covered the ASA improvements. We’ve covered the ARP AI and we touched on the EF capacity.
So let’s . expand that a bit.
E-Series Capacity
—
Pedro Couto: Yeah, we have 30 terabyte and 60 terabyte drives. So in 2Us, we can put massive data there. So it’s great from energy perspective, and also size of the solution.
Justin Parisi: Right, so there’s a lot of oil and gas type of customers out in Brazil, and they’re generally very interested in performance and doing seismic analysis and that sort of thing. So is that the use case for your E Series there?
Pedro Couto: Yeah, so E Series is great for high performance computing. Also you said about Neto from Brazil.
All of those new hardwares that we are talking about, they could be tested on CPOC, which is a NetApp…
Justin Parisi: CPOC!
Pedro Couto: CPOC, Yeah, it’s a NetApp team and you can profile your workload and they can simulate that workload on all those new hardware. So you can know in your workload how much you would perform in throughput and iops.
Justin Parisi: Can you give us a little more detail on that?
Pedro Couto: Yeah, here in Brazil I had the opportunity to see some use cases on the E Series.
They were mostly on backup and recovery, but also on video surveillance. The speed radar from a whole city relied on E Series, so, yeah.
Justin Parisi: Yeah, video surveillance and video playback while it’s being recorded is pretty major in E Series because it is built for performance specifically, especially with the single files.
So having that ability to play back the video as you’re recording it is key for an E Series workload.
Pedro Couto: Yeah, and also when you have a project that raw capacity means the most and you don’t need the ONTAP features, E Series is a great choice.
Justin Parisi: Yeah, absolutely. I remember years ago we would compare it to cars where an E Series would be the Drag Racer, whereas ONTAP would be your Lamborghini.
Closing
—
Justin Parisi: All right. That’s a lot of announcements for this launch on February 11th here. So again, if we wanted to reach you, John, how do we do that?
John Woodall: @ John_Woodall on X.
Justin Parisi: All right. And Andre.
Andre Unterberg: @ DerSchmitz on X.
Justin Parisi: And Oliver.
Oliver Fuckner: You can find me with my real four letter family name on LinkedIn.
Justin Parisi: Your real four letter family name?
Oliver Fuckner: Yeah, well, I have a problem with my family name because everybody is trying to censor it out or doing stuff with it. So…
Justin Parisi: every time I say it, I’m like cringe a little bit.
Cause I’m like, am I saying it right? Am I like, but yeah,
Oliver Fuckner: And the problem is that if you want to register your account with this name, you have to send your ID card to show that you’re really entitled, that this is not a fake. So yeah, this is my real family name.
Justin Parisi: It’s a challenge there. All right.
And Pedro, how do we reach you?
Pedro Couto: @ PedroCoutoTech, I’m on BlueSky, X, and also on LinkedIn.
Justin Parisi: Alright, excellent. Well, thanks so much for joining us today. Again, if you want to reach out to the A-Team, Sam Moulton is your person on LinkedIn, or you can reach out to her via the X account. I think it’s @NetAppATeam still.
So again, thanks everyone for joining us today and talking to us all about the NetApp Launch.
All right. That music tells me it’s time to go. If you’d like to get in touch with us, send us an email to podcast@netapp.com or send us a tweet at NetApp. As always, if you’d like to subscribe, find us on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, iHeartRadio, SoundCloud, Stitcher, or via techontappodcast.com.
If you liked the show today, leave us a review. On behalf of the entire Tech ONTAP podcast team, I’d like to thank the NetApp A-Team for joining us today. As always, thanks for listening.
Podcast intro/outro: [Outro]
