NetApp Insight 2025 - Day 2 Recap
The theme of the day - getting from A to B, as quickly as possible with as little effort as possible.
Welcome back! Conference weeks are LONG weeks, but from the comfort of my desk I have the luxury of sorting through all of the information without needing to put in 20,000+ steps days.
While this wasn’t a day of breaking news the way Day 1 was, there were some real gems of information that came out:
Enhanced Ransomware Detection
More about this was revealed by Gagan Gulati, who has been leading and enhancing the Cloud side of the Product group (specifically software) for the last several years.
First, we learned that this AI-powered auto-remediation is a premium add-on service. Just like how we shared that our AI models need to be making inferences and decisions ASAP, we need to be detecting & remediating issues ASAP.
Independent lab tests validated 99% detection, with ZERO false positives.
Phrased differently, AI-powered attacks need AI-powered defenses and automatic remediation.
Sick of Broadcom? Read on…
Tools for Shifting & Converting to Hyperscalers
People often forget that their latest features don’t mean anything unless Customers are truly ready for them. There has been an unbelieveable amount written about this for the last several years, but it’s still a very real problem. I cannot overstate this - lots of Customers are only 2 or 3 years into a 5 year renewal or trying to figure out how to get out of a 3 year renewal they were forced into because they had no other options.
One of the demos/labs today spotlighted how workloads can be near-instantly migrated off of vSphere. In this instance 1,000 VMs were migrated to another hypervisor, such as KVM or Hyper-V. Intuitively we can also take this to mean one of the 1st-party cloud providers’ VMware instances such as Azure VMware Solution in Azure, Google Cloud VMware Engine in GCP or Amazon Elastic VMware Service in AWS.
This will be an incredible boon to Customers that still feel held to vendor lock-in.
SnapMirror and FlexCache FOR ALL
I cannot overstate how important this is to organizations. My literal first day on the job in IT I learned that NetApp was synonomous with instant replication. It’s your data, it should be available where and when you want it - and that includes FSXN, ANF and/or GCNV.
Data FREEDOM!
While this wasn’t as game-changing a day as yesterday was, it felt like the goal was to let Customers wrap their brains around the news from Day 1. Even with that, the “auto-migrate off of vSphere” lab could have been a FAR bigger announcement.
There’s still a lot to think about that came out today, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how to summarize it. Here’s what I landed on:
It’s your Data; it should reside where you want it, whenever you want it to be there. You no longer have to spend so much time thinking about logistics - you’re now free to spend more time thinking about driving your business forward and how to defend the house you’ve built in real-time.
That’s it for Day 2, folks!