Alongside VMware I have found the NetApp presentation to be one of the most interesting and relevant for myself. NetApp presented the Microsoft Azure NetApp Files services as well their Virtual Desktop Services offering. This was a really refreshing presentation for me, I had assumed with NetApp presenting we would have seen traditional storage solutions running in the cloud but I was presently surprised by the content presented.

Azure NetApp Files

Firstly we saw the Microsoft Service named Azure NetApp Files. A service ran by Microsoft natively in Azure (Not through the marketplace) allowing you to run Windows and Linux workloads in the cloud with high performance, as well as offering enterprise grade storage management including snapshots, clones, replication and tiering)

Azure NetApp Files supports NFS v3 and v4.1 as well as SMB3 allowing for a range of file based use cases, discussed was use cases around Enterprise File Repositories, Databases, HPC and VDI

https://cloud.netapp.com/azure-netapp-files

NetApp Virtual Desktop Services (VDS)

NetApp VDS comes from the acquisition of CloudJumper earlier this year. VDS is SaaS control plane allowing you to deploy, manage and optimise virtual desktop environment across on-premises and public clouds. Unlike Citrix and VMware Horizon, VDS leaves the brokering up to Microsoft RDS or WVD in the native cloud infrastructures and concentrates on the management capabilities mentioned previously.

With Microsoft’s release and continued improvement of WVD I am increasingly seeing customers wanting to look at the native Microsoft offering without rapping a third party brokering service. As such NetApp VDS sits nicely in this gap allowing admins to rely on WVD for the element it is best at whilst adding full lifecycle management capabilities.

https://cloud.netapp.com/virtual-desktop-service

Conclusion

It was refreshing to see cloud services from a traditional storage vendor like NetApp and I look forward to learning more and covering more about these technologies.

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StorPool installs on standard servers, running on Linux it pools all performance and capacity across nodes starting initially from 3 nodes. It offers high throughput with up to 1 million IOPS per node offering in excess of 10million IOPS in a 10 node system, critically with extremely low latency. StorPool is focused on new-age IT workloads including KVM and Kubernetes but also support vSphere and Hyper-V. Due to it’s high performance, low latency and software defined nature StorPool is often utilised by Hosting Providors and MSPs to deliver multi-tenant cloud solutions.

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Scality offer Scale-Out File and Object Storage Solutions with Support for On-Premises, AWS S3, Google Cloud and Azure.

Scality presented their experiences with kubernetes as they redesigned the distriubtion of their key offering Scality RING from RPM packages to their own bespoke MetalK8’s offering. Their Zenko solution stood out to me, Zenko offers the freedom to use object and file storage solutions on-premises and in the cloud whilst having unified management, single namespace, metadata search, flexible replication between clouds, all whilst still storing data in the native cloud formats.

Zenko supports, Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, Google Cloud Storage, Wasabi, as well as on-premises solutions such as their own RING offering and legacy NAS.

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Pure Storage presented their software defined storage management platform for Kubernetes PortWorx. PortWorx was acquired by Pure Storage in September this year after working closely within many customers utilising PortWorx for Kubernetes projects on top of Pure Storage. PortWorx will continue to be agnostic of the underlying storage platform and offers Kubernetes centric, Backup, DR, Migration, Security and Automation tools alongside software defined storage. Another of it’s USPs is its application centric approach aligned with how containers are deployed apposed to a machine centric approach that other solutions take.

An interesting presentation from a solution that ticks a number of boxes for those looking at storage management solutions for Kubernetes, if you would like to try PortWorx out yourself check out the interactive demos https://central.portworx.com/.

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Today is the first day of Cloud Field Day 9 #CFD9, due to COVID taking place online over 3 days with 7 organisations presenting to the field day delegates. For more information check out the #CFD9 page here

The first organisation presenting at #CFD9 was VMware covering VMware vRealize portfolio but with a specific focus on how the portfolio can be used in conjunction with the public cloud and the VMware Cloud solutions on AWS and other platforms.

You can see my doodles from the presentationbelow but I was particularly impressed how far VMware has come with delivering aaS options for the portfolio that have feature parity with the on-premises versions. Also VMware Network Insight stood out as an invaluable tool to plan application migrations. I will blog further about these elements and the portfolio separately.

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The first doodle, covers positioning of the portfolio, recent updates announced at VMworld and how VMware Network Insight (VRNI) can be used to plan a migration of individual applications to the cloud.

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The second doodle covers utilising vRealize Operations Manager monitoring and managing your VMC workloads as well as using VMware vRealize Automation to create user deployable solutions agnostic of the infrastructure the workload will run on.