10 sessions to watch at NetApp Insight if you love on-prem

It’s the Insight time of year again! With NetApp’s largest conference just around the corner, it’s time to summarize interesting sessions that I recommend.

With Insight being virtual it’s easy to join wherever you are. Sit in the comfort of your home or gather your nerdy friends! I find the convenience of watching online appealing, that may be because I’m a family father with small kids at home.

Enough with the chit-chat! Time to get into the real stuff. Below I list interesting sessions that I recommend from my preference. Of course, there are a lot of additional sessions to view and your interest may be different from mine.

Register at: https://insight.netapp.com

Date: November 1-3

1 - What’s new and best practices for VMware vSphere with ONTAP [1058]

Topic: Virtualization

Technical Level Advanced - L3

As VMware is the number one workload running on NetApp’s install base across the world this session is a given! Chance Bingen (Senior Technical Marketing Engineer) is skilled in everything VMware. In this session Chance and Cedric walks through updates on how to tailor your ONTAP system to VMware. They also highlight news in ONTAP Tools (old VSC) and SnapCenter.

2 - Enterprise Object Storage in the Data Fabric [1246]

Topic: Object Storage

Technical Level Information - L1

StorageGrid is one of the most powerful object storage solutions for the enterprise. In this lab, we will see how to benefit from the features of StorageGrid in the enterprise. I would look into this as object storage is one of the emerging technologies in IT.

3 - Getting Started with ONTAP Automation [1247]

Topic: DevOps & Kubernetes

Technical Level Information - L1

As I’m a freak who loves the terminal over the GUI, I love Ansible!! I’m also confident that the DevOps paradigm will be the de-facto standard to run operations. It’s easy to see how efficiency increase when you can replicate configs and deployments in minutes! Also, Ansible (& Terraform) helps in the change management process as the change advisory board sees what changes you intend to do. Finally, you get the benefit of somewhat having the environment documented in code with these “Infrastructure as Code” tools.

4 - Improving Performance with NVMe/TCP [1256]

Topic: Storage Foundations

Technical Level Information - L1

NetApp ONTAP is the number one storage operating system offering multiprotocol support. The latest addition to supported protocols is NVMe over TCP (NVMe/TCP). Some say it’s the replacement of iSCSI, and, I guess why not, it runs over the same infrastructure but with additional benefits.

5 - Protection and Recovery From Ransomware With ONTAP [1248]

Topic: Storage Foundations

Technical Level Information - L1

Today, with everything that happens in the world, I’m not surprised that ransomware is top of mind. Just imagine how your organization would react if all data was encrypted with days to recovery. In this session, we enter the world of how to protect and mitigate ransomware attacks with ONTAP. Recommended for everyone!

6 - Backup PB scale [1157]

Topic: Cyber Resilience & Data Protection

Technical Level Intermediate - L2

Everyone knows that data grows, every day in production, it grows. Soon you will be on the PB scale if you aren’t already. How do you back up at that scale? And, how did you recover? Watch this session to view the NetApp solution.

7 - Discover Block Level Storage Tiering for Storage Efficiency [1249]

Topic: Object storage

Technical Level Intermediate - L2

Talking about the PB scale, how much of that data is cold? Rarely used? Why should that data sit on expensive primary storage? This lab demonstrates how to reduce costs by tiering less infrequently used data to object storage.

8 - Getting Started with Cloud Insights [1258]

Topic: ONTAP

Technical Level Intermediate - L2

How do you monitor your NetApp environment? How do you know the used capacity and such? Do you need to report back to stakeholders on important metrics? With Cloud Insights, you can ditch all homemade scripts and fragmented solutions. This all-in-one tool has everything you need. Monitor NetApp systems (all of them), VMware, Kubernetes, and even competitor systems. Additionally, you also get CIFS auditing and ransomware protection from Cloud Insights! This is a must-watch for every NetApp owner out there.

9 - Astra Family in Action [1133]

Topic: DevOps & Kubernetes

Technical Level Intermediate - L2

Let’s talk workloads on-premise, I guess VMware is the primary workload for you, but, will it still be in 5-10 years? Kubernetes is on the rise and changing everything we know about running applications in production. Suddenly the business demand containers and agility, the need for Kubernetes. In the beginning, Kubernetes was made for stateless apps, but as we all know, how many apps do not have a state?! Almost all of them have a data footprint and especially in the enterprise you need security, availability, scalability, and recoverability. With NetApp as a storage provider, you get advanced data management features in Kubernetes.

10 - A close look at Supplemental Datastore for VMware Cloud [1185]

Topic: Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Technical Level Advanced L3

OK, ok, ok, ok, ok, ok. I know you love on-prem, but what if you need to run a large project for a limited period? Or, if you require a secondary, or, tertiary recovery site? With VMware Cloud and NetApp storage, you get a performance and cost-efficient solution to run VMware in the cloud. The experience is the same but you leverage the infrastructure of the public cloud, with features such as auto-scaling and storage-on-demand. Even if you are on-prem, you should watch this.