UPDATED 18:10 EDT / JULY 16 2013

Clustered Storage: Meeting Tomorrow’s Data Storage Needs | #NetAppChat Highlights

#NetAppChat, NetApp, #NetAppChat Twitter Chat, NetApp Twitter ChatYesterday we teamed up one more time with storage service provider NetApp in our joint series with The Wikibon Project.  This week’s #NetAppChat covered the topic: “Clustered Storage: Meeting Tomorrow’s Data Storage Needs.”

As we did with the first #NetAppChat, “Where Does Software-Defined Storage Fit Into the IT Renaissance?“, here is a recap of some of the best questions and answers from the virtual event.

  • What types of storage challenges do application owners face to support their business critical applications?

As the enterprise space evolves, its storage requirements evolve too.  Addressing the new needs of the enterprise, NetApp recently released Clustered Data ONTAP 8.2, introducing a number of powerful capabilities designed to cut through traditional storage limitations and help IT departments “non-disruptively align the storage infrastructure with changing business and application demands.”

NetApp is going all-in on clustering, a gamble that Wikibon co-founder and chief analyst Dave Vellante says can pay off big time given the rapid adoption of software-led architectures in the enterprise.

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  • What are some of the important trends in data storage technologies and storage software for the support of business critical applications?

Scale-out architectures at the enterprise level marks a trend in data storage technologies. The ability to achieve scale-out an architecture and match it to the general purpose IT use case, as opposed to it being siloed in specific verticals, is very helpful. This allows you a lot of flexibility in doing things like maintenance and upgrades. Simply put, you don’t have to put up with outages anymore. Companies like NetApp are being pushed to rethink the data center in regards to how software can improve efficiency because CIOs are moving from builders + operators of applications and data centers to brokers of information services to the enterprise.

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  • How does NetApp’s approach to delivering IT agility differ from that of others in the industry?

“For NetApp, automation is critical. It’s easy to move stuff around with NetApp’s architecture but it’s still manual. Running scripts on one box and moving things around to another is no big deal. But when you move to a large environment, scripts don’t scale. When something goes bad you need the system to heal itself. OnCommand is how NetApp will ultimately get there,” writes SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier in a recent Forbes piece.

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  • What is NetApp’s vision for the future of data storage? How does this align with application and solution providers?

NetApp is betting big on two things in particular: Clustering and flexibility to move data out of the silo. In addition to both of those, Software-led Infrastructure is a key component of NetApp’s long term innovation roadmap. NetApp is the last pure-play ‘storage company’ standing. Storage as we’ve known it for the past twenty years is over. For NetApp that means it needs to focus on making the best storage product possible, and retain customers through its core competencies. Time is not on its side, and to truly remain a leader in this space NetApp must craft a well-defined Storage-as-a-Platform strategy, Wikbon’s Dave Vellante recommends, and sooner rather than later.

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  • How do you see the storage space evolving in the next few years? What do solution providers need to do to keep up?

We’ve made it pretty clear who we see as our Fab Four for the future of Software-Defined Storage. How flash and virtualization play into all of this storage conversation is interesting enough to note as far as storage evolution in the near term.

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See the Storify collection for the full recap of today’s: #NetAppChat.


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