 All right, I think we'll go ahead and get started. My name is Michael Bag, and I'm a systems engineer for NetApp. And what we're going to talk about today is the importance of data management for NFE. Although I think that when we start talking about NFE, we're also going to maybe merge some ideas around what is the next generation data center. Because as I got a slide that I'll explain a little bit later, there is a little bit of a merging of the private cloud that exists in telcos and the NFE space. You'll see more and more that both of those environments are beginning to be managed by the same teams. So the agenda today will do some little introduction around NetApp. I'll talk some bit around what NetApp means for NFE architectures and next generation data center architectures. And I'll look around at NetApp's portfolio as it applies to NFE. So what is NetApp? Is everybody here familiar with NetApp? Shared storage? Yes, we have met up friends and family in here. But for some network architectures, network architect teams and team members, NFE teams, the concept and idea of shared storage is a little bit foreign. Typically, when NFE teams begin to look at NFE, they have their own environments. They have their own. They get carved out of the organization as a whole and they get sort of self-managed. Typically, they'll build their own kind of open stack environment. They'll run their proof of concept. They'll do a bunch of synthetic work load testing. And they really don't have any sense or need yet of what a shared storage vision means. So for those who are here who are not used to running or managing or working with storage, NetApp is an enterprise shared storage vendor. And I've got a few marketing tidbits up here. Number one vendor satisfaction for converter structure. If you've worked with UCS FlexPod, of course, you've worked with NetApp. Number two, in a flash market, we had a pure HPE and IBM. And of course, we are the creator of ONTAP, the world's number one branded data management software. Now, one tidbit that's not on here that I probably ought to have added is that NetApp is the number one commercial storage platform deployed against open stack in the market. So that is an important thing to think about. And how does shared storage even enter into open stack? When do you get to that point in you're looking at storage and managing storage when you're that NFV IT director and you're finally ready to start pushing your environment away from that sort of lab environment to production is you'll come across this sort of one line where you'll see that it says something like this. So you'll see this idea that I'll just read it. In many environments, the affirmable disk are stored on the computer host's local disk. But for production environments, we recommend that the computer host be configured to use a shared storage system instead. And for a lot of NFV teams who have been marching along, maturing their NFV tenant that they've chosen or a collection of NFV tenants, they've got their synthetic workloads running and they've proved out the requirements. And now they're ready to move towards production. And generally what that means is just this. They begin to start using a shared storage. And when they do that, they encounter some problems they had yet not encountered. Things like scale, things like having a deterministic kind of predictable performance, the ability to put quality of service, all of the kind of programmatic controls that they had absolute understanding and control of when it was on a host-based storage. Now, when they're in a shared system, they may even be encountering workload or not workload, but workflow problems where now there's a workflow where to get storage, they have to run through a ticketing system or that storage system has to be managed with a GUI. And when we're talking about NFV, we're talking about scale, talking about automation, if you have a storage system that doesn't provide for programmatic kinds of controls, that's gonna be a problem. You can't have the rapidity of scale for NFV if you have to go touch a GUI, if you have to go and cut a ticket for some human being to get involved to do something. So that's where commercial shared storage is going to enter the picture for a lot of these NFV environments. Net up as a long history with OpenStack. Of course, we've had founding members for middle on our team, the project team lead that helped break Cinder away from Nova. There's actually an engineer that's on the solidifier team. So there's been a long history and dedicated support and continued support for the OpenStack storage environment where the, not just the major contributor for Cinder-Middler, I think we still are the largest contributor for those code sets and code bases. We've also a gold charter member of the Cloud Native Cloud Foundation. You know, that same engineer who worked on Cinder, broke Cinder out from Nova, also wrote the Docker volume plugin. Of course, we have many architectures with FlexPod that support OpenStack, including FlexPod with Docker Data Center. What we're talking about with this slide here is this idea that the telco network, the kind of ubiquity of the global telco space where what sort of happens in the telco world begins to filter and trickle its way down from just the telco and the hyperscale and that service provider space down to the enterprise and from the enterprise down to the small and medium business. You know, I know of a, and what that means is that when we see these NFD teams begin to collapse with the private cloud teams in the telco space, we're gonna start seeing that more and more in the enterprise space. And that's what we'll sort of call it, the next generation data center. Like this differentiation between NFE and IT telco cloud and data centers as a whole is beginning to converge. We're beginning to see the demand and the same drivers for NFE begin to move into the data center as a whole. And it begins to cut across all verticals and all the company sizes. You know, I know a small city in Alberta, Canada where they're running their parking system on OpenStack. And when you begin to scratch the surface of how they're running that and what that data center that they're running that platform on, it begins to look a little bit like the Etsy architecture. You know, so then I'm talking about a city with not much resources without the kind of enterprise ability and scale of teams to run this are absolutely running on OpenStack environments. And it looks a lot like NFE. And in fact, it maps to the kind of IoT workloads that we're going to start talking about. You'll wear, you think of the handheld device that scans the, or the driven device that scans the license plates of cars down to the ability for the person who receives the ticket to pay the ticket with their phone or the pay the ticket online. You know, those kinds of platforms and those kinds of services are no longer just at the hyperscale or at the telco level. So these same drivers that we're talking about here this ability to scale, you know, even if they're at small scale or scaling up to large, cuts across all of those market sizes. And even though I just mentioned a sort of a point solution environment, the reality is that NFE is going to have to support multi-tenancy. We think about supporting those critical kinds of workloads that touch healthcare. You know, I know that in California there's a large healthcare service provider. This is beginning to consolidate their software environments off of hospitals into the cloud. And that's going to be kind of a nervous making thing as we begin to have software that runs incubators for premature infants is going to be running into cloud. So how do you deliver the kind of high availability and critical nature of a software environment like that in an NFE environment and deliver the same kind of resiliency when it was on-prem? So multi-tenancy is going to be very important. Data is entering the needs of NFE environments at a tremendous rate. You know, I often, you know, I recall meeting many NFE IT directors, they say, well, you know, I don't really have a storage problem. Well, not yet. Because what we're beginning to see is that the desired need for your NFE tenants and the environments and the applications that those NFE tenants were supporting are going to have to reach and touch fast and large data storage pools. I look at the oil and gas sector that is beginning to use drones for existence. They use these drones to do monitoring of drilling platforms or pipelines. And these drones are doing everything from infrared analysis, spectrogas spectrometer analysis of the pipes to make sure there's no leakage or corrosion. But they also do things like monitor safety here. You know, from an imaging standpoint, they can see that everybody's wearing the right you know, hard hats or gloves or boots. You know, they can do this kind of imaging. And this is this NFE IoT mix where, you know, this drone is emitting terabytes of data every time it does a flyover. And how do you do the analysis of that data? How do you ingest that data in an environment? Typically, NFE has not been a capacity demand or capacity required environment. But more and more it is in an environment it requires, you know, fast, large storage pools. And then of course, you may have NFE environments that are specifically performance related where capacity is less so of a factor and performance is a desired attribute. And the kinds of scale that you're going to see for particularly large telecos that are covering large geographic regions are much more generators are going to have to scale. And your storage is gonna support that thousands of elements in instantiated VMs. See what else. Yeah, drink some water. So you see the five principles of storage that fit all of the use cases that I kind of mentioned are quite simply listed here. You know, these principle storage, this idea that you need to be able to scale. And the scale goes from, you know, a telco that may have a number of small points of presence within a metropolitan urban area. You're gonna see these sort of, you know, 10U nebs compliant boxes scattered throughout a metropolitan area to support that sort of cloud edge environment. And what kind of storage are you gonna put in that? You know, how are you gonna be able to, you know, manage that storage when there's failures? You know, what kind of architecture is it going to live in these sort of pop-based environments where if the piece of storage fails, how do you resolve it? So if you're supporting, you know, dozens of, you know, NFE pods, so in a metropolitan area, you know, how do you provide the kind of lifecycle maintenance? How do you provide the kind of failover support in those environments? You need to be able to, if a part of that storage system fails, send a smart hands guy out there to resolve it. You know, you're not gonna be able to send a storage architect or a storage designer to repair that system. It's just not gonna scale right. You need to be able to send a smart hands guy out there who can just pull out the, you know, the node three with the two ports to connect the system back up and it self-heals. And if the environments are gonna require the kind of deterministic guaranteed performance, you need to be able to put swim lanes around the volumes of supporting various of your NFE workloads. You need to be able to adjust those on the fly. The degree of automation management of being able to provide not just scripted or templated kinds of deployments and management and maintenance, you need to be able to allow for kind of the modern machine to machine. Like you are looking now towards, you know, sort of AI-controlled kinds of deployment and configuration. And you're not gonna be able to do that if you have a storage system that requires manual kinds of configuration and interfaces that a human being has to touch. NetApp is a portfolio company. We have a number of portfolio products that will map into any number of requirements that fit the range of NFE workloads to fill it out there. NFE will fit across the customer premise equipment. That's the CPE at the far end, through Edge and Mobile Edge Cloud, like I was just talking about, where you have those sort of urban NFE pods scattered throughout an environment to, you know, those larger regional data centers, or to even the central data centers. You know, there's gonna be a span and a range of types of requirements, a span and range of the size and scale, you know, all the way down from the 10U NEBS compliant pod up to, you know, those massive data centers that we all know and love. So when we talk about the portfolio that maps across that range, there's three primary products that'll fit in there. We can talk about the E-Series, talk about FAS or all flash FAS, talk about SolidFire. And generally what you'll see is environments where they'll have more or less of one of these environments. And let's say if you have sort of the capacity growth youth case, and what you'll see is the FAS or the all flash FAS, put against that and you'll augment it with SolidFire, or you'll augment it within E-Series depending on what kind of requirements do you have. And conversely, you may have a larger SolidFire deployment and you'll, and it's, you have that need for rich API and the automation, but you may also have some performance that you require and you could augment that with the E-Series. You'll find NetApp throughout the Etsy NFE model. You'll find it in all of the elements. You'll, you know, of course I'll probably talk more about where NetApp fits into NFEI, but of course it also connect is a VNF tenant itself. Many teams are breaking the OSS and BSS away from the Etsy model and they have its own self-supported architecture. You'll find NetApp in there. NetApp has a number of tools and integrations with things like Antibole, Chef, Puppet, Fuel, Ubuntu, where you have to have the degree of integration in the rich data management capabilities that may exist beyond what's available through the typical Etsy deployment. And I think I'll talk a little bit more around where NetApp fits into NFEI, which is where I see most of the deployments taking place. And from my sort of jaundice view, because I am an SE for the SolidFire team, SolidFire is where you'll see a lot of NFE deployments because SolidFire maps exactly to those five kind of next generation data center are NFEI principles that we talk about. This idea of being to scale, this idea of having guaranteed performance, management, data assurance, efficiencies. You know, I don't think that global efficiencies are the kinds of efficiencies that fit into storage are paid too very much attention to in NFEI environments, but these are real world kinds of savings considerations that you have to take into account. Things like power and space are gonna be quite critical when you start talking about landing those small NFE pods throughout. You absolutely need to have table stakes, kinds of modern data efficiencies and deduplication and compression. If you're using a storage environment that doesn't have those kinds of capabilities, it's gonna be problematic when you begin to scale or we're gonna have multitudes. Data assurance for SolidFire are absolutely critical in these environments. As you begin to scale in environments, as you begin to have a geographic dispersion of your environments, you will not have the ability to provide the traditional kinds of maintenance that you have had with your storage. For SolidFire, if you're going to lose a disc or a node, it returns back to an HA state within minutes or an hour if you lose a node. And when that happens, you're back up to HA and then you can replace that node at your leisure. FedEx at the next day. Pull the node out, put the node in. You can just get the smart hands with a heart hat and a yellow vest to go out and replace that node. The full API that's available in SolidFire is unmatched by any other storage platform. When we begin to talk about that migration away from manual configuration, manual kinds of dashboard interface to a templated and scripted to machine to machine, SolidFire is an absolute fit for that. That's expressly where the NFE Worldhouse requires. Performance is another thing and, you know, SolidFire is not the fastest storage platform, but the idea of being able to put swim lanes, being able to have sort of that deterministic quality of service that you could apply on a per volume basis is absolutely critical to NFE workloads. Especially when you're gonna start sharing those workloads with other systems that perhaps do not have that level of sophistication. You need to have a way to provide that minimum quality of service to those workloads that are supporting critical workloads and critical NFE tenants. You can only do that with an ability of having that rich sort of minimum and maximum and burst kinds of quality of service that SolidFire provides. In scale, of course, is important. When you're talking about supporting the sort of microscale NFE pods that are throughout a metropolitan region to massive data centers where you're going to have to land 40 to 100 nodes, SolidFire is absolutely a fit for that. And of course, this is where we're talking about some of the more time and space features of SolidFire. It's like, it's simply less cables, it's less rack space, less administration. This is where SolidFire makes it so easy and smart for if you're trying to have that repeatable deployment experience, you can absolutely create kind of an automated ingestion and deployment that you can absolutely mechanize for the subsequent repeated scale out kinds of deployments you're gonna have throughout an environment. The day zero for SolidFire is very straightforward, very easy. And if you need to be able to replicate that across scale, across larger deployments, this is absolutely critical. On tap select. Now, it's kind of interesting. I know that NetApp is simply short for network appliance. You know, the very idea that the software defined storage is of itself a VNF. It is a tenant that lives with that environment and can provide with that environment exactly those kinds of rich data features and data management that isn't available through the Etsy architecture. When you begin to start landing a range of NFE tenants that have very low levels of maturity, you know, they're not quite yet cloud aware. They are still in a kind of maybe not pet but maybe not cattle kind of state where they require that sort of pseudo legacy environment. You absolutely need to be able to provide something like on tap select at that NFE level, at that layer to provide the services to those applications that still require it. And this is what was described here is where you can place on tap as a VNF. You can run it as a VNF and abstract away from even non-NetApp environment, non-NetApp hardware environments. You can set it on top of a VMware vSphere or vSAN or KVM, which of course is still in beta. It also lives down in the NFE. You can have on tap in the NFE layer and provide that wide sort of Swiss tool knife capability set for the NFE environment. And again, it can abstract away from even non-NetApp hardware. So I don't have a storage problem. Many NFE IT directors say and I'm here to say you don't know about the problems that you're going to have. You know, and you don't want to wait as a manager of an NFE environment until you have storage problems. These are very difficult problems to retrofit. If you've marched yourself down the path of using a certain kind of storage platform and storage software that you haven't yet encountered the difficulties around scale, around the difficulties of automation, it's very difficult to turn the tide back and redeploy. So you want to examine these problem sets quite carefully. You want to look at the relationship like the hardware that you deploy in a storage environment absolutely is going to have an effect on the kinds of capabilities you can have at the layers upstream. Like when you begin to abstract away from the hardware layer, there absolutely are still going to be the dependencies on the kinds of data services that you have lying beneath. NetApp really reduces the time to deployment, the ease of management, life cycle management. I think that life cycle management is often overlooked. What are you going to do when you get to the sort of end of scale, end of life point in most of your storage environments? You're not going to have the luxury of being able to do outages or do forklift upgrades. You absolutely need to have a way to do zero performance, zero impact to running environment uplift when you begin to replace your environment. And for storage, that's absolutely important. And for a lot of teams who are just starting out and they've had their proof of concept environment, they've never gotten to the point where they've reached the end of their scale or reached the end of life for their underpinning architecture and hardware because they haven't had it that long. And so if you don't have the built-in roadmap and timeline for managing the underlying uplift that you have for your storage, it's going to be a problem. NetApp solutions are software defined absolutely. The NFE environments, the next generation data center environments because you're going to be a mix of physical and virtualized and containerized in cloud environments. And you have to have a way to be able to provide that consistent integration and a consistent kind of consumption across all of those environments. Whether the team is deploying against the cloud or whether they're deploying against a hybrid environment or whether they're deploying against physical infrastructure that is on premise, it absolutely must have the same fit and feel. It's not going to make any sense whatsoever to have distinct and differentiated kinds of deployments to support storage. And I've talked enough about scalability. Absolutely, scale is going to encroach upon nearly every single environment that we see today. The growth for capacity-related requirements is quite well understood, but it's going to be beyond what we can handle. And here I'll go through a few use cases. Here we're talking about the deployment to cross all pops in National Toko. And this is exactly where we're going to have the sort of small five to 20 nebs-based compliant nodes on site. This is solid-fire-based. Here we're talking about the solid-fire 9605, which in the sort of world of solid-fire that's the medium, if you're talking about the small, medium, and large-sized nodes. And this allows exactly for the kind of scaling requirements that they have where you can scale from five to 20 nodes per site quite trivially. When they're starting to start small, they don't quite have a large capacity requirements in providing the sort of cloud-edge pop deployment. The next use case that we talked about here is something that does require a scaling in growth of capacity requirements. And this is using the hybrid FAS. So they are starting quite small, maybe with a number of nodes, not quite as broad, only three pops. But they've, within the past two years, have grown 13 times and expect to go within an extra year to 24X. So you talk about growth and scaling requirements to go 24X in three years. How can you anticipate that? How can you begin to roadmap and plan if you are not using an environment or a storage support system that allows for that kind of scale? And again, you can probably draw a Venn diagram that describes what you can achieve with the automation capabilities of a solid fire, the automation capabilities within ONTAP, and then even the kinds of brute force kinds of automation that you can do within E-Series. I mean, think about E-Series as being the kind of dumb but fast hardware environment. You can absolutely begin to put those kinds of scripted and power show kinds of tools to get similar kinds of deployment. But it's actually not gonna be as rich and available as what you can get with solid fire. Automation resources, absolutely. I find many customers who ingest some NetApp are not quite taking advantage of the automation that's available to NetApp hardware and NetApp software. If you are still configuring any of your environment, and not just storage, but also computed if you're still doing manual configuration and sort of this custom high touch work to make an environment go, you're doing it wrong. You absolutely need to find the resources and find ways to automate and provide the kind of configuration that requires less touch. You know, this idea of having a high touch, low value activities is not gonna be sustainable. You want low touch, high value. So if you're using any of Ansible or Puppetiff using Ansible to do deployments, that's absolutely what you should be doing. I mean, a number of customers are simply asking for a Mac address, you know, rather than doing a hand touch integration, they simply just need the Mac address of a node and then they can run through the track of script to deploy that. And that's absolutely the kind of direction that people wanna go in. And I think that's the end of the slides that I have for you. You can find me at the booth, D3, it's within the marketplace over there and of course, there'll be other NetApp folk to help you out or answer any questions. But I think that's it. Any questions that people wanna bring or ask? Absolutely. So the question is around why the focus on NFE because I see this in data scissors as a whole. That's absolutely correct. The collapsing of the way telcos and the hyperscale, large enterprise or approaching solving NFE have absolutely began to encroach down into standard data center use across enterprise. So you're absolutely correct. That collapsing is happening. I see even within NetApp, people beginning to describe NFE as next generation data center. NFE is simply just another type of or specific type of next generation data center that fits in with the kind of a larger umbrella of that next generation data center. Because all of these requirements, when we talk about being able to scale, having deterministic kinds of predictive performance, built-in efficiencies, the ability to have HAA with an automated recovery to working state, those absolutely exist at the sort of non-NFV. But you'll find when I do look at the next generation data center deployments to support things like parking applications or IoT, it looks very much like the FC diagram for NFE. Very much so. Anybody else? Is it just us? All right. Well, thank you very much for your time. And I will see you with the NetApp booth.