Tag: SFD16

#SFD16 – Nasuni Enterprise File Services Platform

RoundTower Technologies sells a lot of Nasuni, which is how I came to know about their UniFS solution. Nasuni has come a long way from their early days, and the size of their customer-base is proportional to their growth as a company.

What I like about their product strategy, is they have led with public cloud, rather than adding it on as an afterthought. This cloud-first architecture gives them the unique ability to provide enterprise file services that scale globally across many geographic sites. If you need to provide multi-site enterprise file services and you are currently caught in the mesh of legacy NAS to get that done, then consider Nasuni as an alternative.

SFD16 Nasuni Session Resources:

#SFD16 – NetApp OCI and Cloud Insight

 One of my largest enterprise customers is a prolific user of NetApp OnCommand Insight (OCI) for global storage management, which is how I came to appreciate the scale, flexibility and functionality of OCI. James Holden did a great job of covering OCI and the Cloud Insight SaaS offering in the sessions below.

If you are an enterprise looking for a ubiquitous storage management system, then OCI is definitely worth considering, even if you do not have NetApp storage arrays. If you are an SMB or Commercial customer, then Cloud Insight would be a better fit, since it is the SaaS offering of OCI. OCI and Cloud Insight do not have feature parity, due to the markets being addressed.

One corner case worth mentioning, if you want to quickly implement a chargeback, showback or “shameback” solution, then OCI could give you the fastest time to value.

SFD16 NetApp Session Resources:

#SFD16 – Dell-EMC PowerMax and CloudIQ

Since #SFD14 last year, the VMAX All Flash has evolved to the PowerMax, which was announced at Dell Technologies World. PowerMax has advanced the VMAX All Flash architecture with NVMe. A nod to the SNIA session, NVMe-over-Fabrics is on the PowerMax road-map. You can watch the videos below to get all of the details. The synopsis of these sessions is this, the Symmetrix/VMAX platform is continuing to evolve, it is still the best-of-breed storage platform for legacy 3-tier hardware and legacy applications that are mission-critical. Make sure you have budget, because you are going to need it. Dell-EMC considers the PowerMax to be a flag-ship offering and will continue to invest and develop that ecosystem, since their customers demand it (yes, FICON will continue to be supported).

After the session, I mentioned to Vince Westin that within the Tech Field Day family he is considered the gold-standard that vendors should try to meet when presenting to a TFD delegation. Presenters that know their stuff, get to the point, have an opinion and are not afraid to express it.

A new offering, CloudIQ, was also presented, basically a storage administrator’s continuous health check that is offered at no extra cost for customers with active Dell-EMC storage support contracts. CloudIQ gets its data feed from the call-home function (ESRS) and is accessible as a SaaS offering, no on-site resources required. If you are an existing Dell-EMC customer, make sure you talk to your Dell-EMC account executive about getting it enabled with your account for the supported storage solutions you have in your data centers, there is definite value here.

SFD16 Dell-EMC Session Resources: