Jay Kidd Insight video

Now, you all remember the IBM PC. This technology changed IT forever. I assume most of you remember – you look old enough. It changed IT forever – right? Thirty-four years ago – it brought affordable computing into the hands of small businesses, of departments and of individuals. It enabled a level of insight and analysis into business processes and it produced significantly better efficiencies. It enabled innovation and resulted in better customer experiences. The IBM PC freed individuals from the constraints that existed in IT at the time and allowed them to independently pursue ideas for their business. And technology, which has this kind of a liberating effect, is unstoppable. PC’s spread throughout the organization of the 1980’s – they were the smartphone of that era. They were the must-have device -- probably the first real viral technology -- and business applications got created. You remember Lotus? You remember dBASE, Ashton-Tate? Companies evolved to run their businesses on networks of PC’s often running a rather tenuous structure of fairly ad hoc applications. And what we learned is that with great freedom comes great responsibility. Because unmanaged freedom can result in anarchy. You all clearly have had the experience of a PC that was running under Mary’s desk and somebody kicked the plug out and suddenly you couldn’t take orders, you couldn’t ship product. And who knew that was in the center of a critical business process? But the PC explosion -- really for the first time -- it taught IT that they couldn’t stop the flow of innovative technology into the enterprise. And they were struggling with -- how do we strike a balance between embracing these technologies, empowering individuals yet also assuring that there’s a discipline that enforces and assures continuity of operations to the business. And it took a little while but IT gradually figured out that it wasn’t about the device -- it was about the data. And if you control the data, that the PC’s were creating, transforming and producing, then you could control the business. IT then became a point of aggregation, of protection for stewardship, for governance of the data. The network storage industry was born. And NetApp played a big role in the early days of this industry delivering technology in nineteen ninety-eight, which allowed PC’s in a Window’s environment to share data with many computers in a UNIX environment. Microsoft got into the game in a big way in the early two thousands embracing SAN, creating a bridge from the PC world into the traditional data center operations world. LINEX matured. And a viable alternative for mini-computer UNIX were running on PC hardware technology emerged and it changed the economics of IT. And, over the last twenty-five years, PC technology came to dominate enterprise IT and it now represents in excess of seventy-five percent of the compute power that exists in the enterprise. But all along that way we learned and we continued to have reinforced that the devices that ran IT were disposable. But it was the data that was durable and the data that really mattered. Now, just as PC’s liberated individuals at that time – enabled them to build applications on their own – the Cloud options that are in the market today are replaying this revolution. So five or six years ago if somebody in a business unit had a great idea – something that’s going to double sales in six months – we’ll be able to get a much better yield on our returns – I’ve got this great idea and I want to build this application – they had to go beg for budget, they had to convince IT to buy servers, they had to deploy some storage, they had to build a team, they had to license software and they had to spend months building this application that may or may not actually produce the result that they hoped for. It’s a soul-sucking experience. But today a twenty-two year old with a little knowledge of GitHub and a credit card can open up a hundred to two hundred VM’s on Amazon, download some open source software, write a few thousand lines of Python, load Mongo and build a massively scaled enterprise application. Not only without IT’s permission but without even them knowing about it. And this is a really cool level of innovation, but it’s also scary. So just as with the PC thirty years ago we’re again faced with the challenge of how do we as an IT community embrace the power of the innovation -- the capabilities of this new technology -- and balance it with the need for discipline of operations to assure continuity? This is a tremendous opportunity for IT and the community of IT to lead because, if we ignore the Cloud -- pretend it doesn’t exist -- just tell people not to use it, what will spring up is a shadow IT organization where well-meaning people will develop applications with very little understanding or very little interest in data protection, recoverability, compliance, regulatory pressures. But if as the IT community we embrace this technology we can turn a mob into a march, turn a riot into a regimen and apply a balance that embraces an innovation yet it brings discipline to the business to take advantage of these latest technologies. But this changes the role of IT in significant ways. It’s no longer only about building infrastructure and running data centers. It’s about marshalling the tools and the applications that acquire, transform, apply and protect the data that runs the business. And in doing that in a Hybrid Cloud environment spanning multiple IT deployment models. And to do this demands a different view of your enterprise data. George described the NetApp data fabric on Tuesday and how it can create a unified set of data management, data transport and data access services that spans multiple Clouds. How it can give you a consistent view of how your applications access your data and make it accessible across multiple Clouds, without having to redesign applications to run in different Cloud environments. It gives you a lot of choice and a lot of control and negotiating power with the Cloud suppliers you work with. And the implications of the data fabric that spans Clouds are pretty profound because it will allow you to think about your overall Hybrid Cloud, your extended IT environment as an integrated infrastructure. And your decision about where to place applications won’t be bound by compatibility of that application with particular PAZ layers or technologies to act in a given Cloud. It will instead be focused by what service level can I get from that particular Cloud, or that particular IT deployment model. Because some Clouds, especially private Clouds, very well-suited for those workloads that you absolutely must control. When the CEO asks why ERP is down, the answer is “Oh, something happened in the Cloud” is not a good answer. There’s things you absolutely have to control that are pivotal to running the business. But there’s other IT deployment models that are really well-suited -- when you want to do an experiment, you want to innovate, you want to develop software, or you’ve got a global-scaled application that may scale up and down where you’ve got variability of consumption of resources -- private Clouds are lousy at that. The NetApp of fabric gives you a unified view of your data across these different Clouds, these different IT deployment models. So what are the implications of this? What will the world become as this becomes complete? Imagine never having to build another data center. Now, in IT and in every company, you all have lots of applications. And all of them take up space, they take up power and probably most critically they take up mindshare, increasingly scarce mindshare from skilled IT operations folks. But unlike your children which you love equally these applications aren’t all equal in your mind. So where do you start? I mean sometimes to refer to these as “craplications” -- and where do you start in moving some workloads to the Cloud? So a great place to start is you’ve got applications that are a little less important than others. If you don’t have a DR scenario, but you feel like you need one, start with standing up disaster recovery for those applications in the Cloud. And using the NetApp data fabric you can make a copy, you can move a copy of the data into the Cloud either into NetApp private storage, close to the Cloud or to Cloud on Tap residing in the Cloud, set up the virtual machine so they can run in the Cloud in the event of a disaster. But you don’t have to modify the application to run in the Cloud – you just have to move it there. As you get comfortable with the DR scenario working and you can test it and do a bunch of things in the Cloud, as you get comfortable, you can then move the primary instance of those less important applications off into the Cloud -- freeing up space in your own data center. And then, by having the same data access methods and data services so the applications can run the same way in the Cloud as in your other data center, that makes it much simpler to just move the applications to the Cloud and not re-write them for the Cloud. I believe that the Hybrid Cloud will allow CIO’s to run applications they don’t care about on infrastructure they don’t own run by people they don’t have to hire, and that’s a compelling solution. And it allows them to focus their very precious and scarce internal data center resource as their private Cloud and the mindshare of their team on those applications they absolutely must run themselves so you’ll never run out of space in your data center because you can always spill out to the other environments. Another implication is imagine if you never had to say “no” to a great new application idea. Now, the business unit’s always coming up with here’s the new application. It’s going to double sales. It’s going to significantly impact the business. I really want to go build this. And it’s been hard to do that. You can’t marshal the resources for it but what if I take and broker a service to enable these innovators in the business units to get access to as much compute power as they needed for developing these applications? You could give them an environment that includes a replica of the production data center or a portion of it that they may need. With common access methods to that data is what they can run within your own data center using Cloud on Tap or using NetApp private storage. With technologies that they also could use internally if they want to make multiple copies of the database so that multiple developers can work in parallel, they can clone the data sets. They want to take snapshots of their work in progress. They want to take advantage of the storage efficiencies. All those capabilities will be there. And then what if you could apply as much compute power as you could lay your hands on and effectively use to parallelize the QA process – the testing of the application? Could that actually shorten the application release time? And then what if these applications were designed in an environment -- we had a common set of services that would let the application run in the Cloud or on premise depending on what made sense? Maybe if you want to start out with this application that promises great things, let it run in the Cloud. If it turns out to be a flop as seventy percent of IT projects may turn out to be, you just spin everything down and you really haven’t lost much. If it runs at lower scale than you expected, running in the Cloud may be the most economic way to do it. But if it runs away, if it takes off and grows huge, moving it into a more economical alternative – maybe on premise, maybe in a different Cloud could be the way to do it. So I’ve heard often that Cloud can significantly reduce the cost of failure but it can also increase the cost of success. So you want the flexibility to place the application where it most makes sense economically. So could this technology accelerate development? Could it lower your cost of applications? Also, could it let you try more things? To fail more and, when you fail, you fail cheaply. And, when you try more, you succeed more. So these two ideas are examples of ways to improve the efficiency or accelerating innovation in the IT environment. But think of what could be possible if you could tap the scale and the power of the public hyper-scale or Clouds using traditional enterprise application technologies and without necessarily having to be completely reliant on newer born in the Cloud application tools and technology. So imagine building an application to collect data -- say it’s from people, from processes, from things in an internet of things type application -- that application could be as simple as a single VM or a couple of virtual machines that can run, that can talk to the people that process the things, gather the information and store that either in a database running in Cloud on Tap or at a set of files. And, if you want to scale that application, you may start small with a couple of virtual machines doing collection. You could add ten, fifteen, twenty VM’s up to some limit all storing data in the shared infrastructure in the Cloud on Tap environment. Then, if you want to replicate that or scale that even larger, take the entire unit of VM’s to collectors, the Cloud on Tap instant and provision that – tens, dozens, hundreds of times around the Cloud to scale out this process of interacting with the real world. And then the application logic can focus on interacting with the devices, the people, the process and things. And you can take advantage of the capabilities of the data fabric to move the data from the Cloud back to a central point for deeper analysis, longer term preservation. The data fabric takes away a lot of the complexity of development of these large scale applications by providing some of the core data management services. Now, this isn’t necessarily a use case for real time ad placement or instantaneous analysis, but I believe that this massive numbers of processes in the real world that operate on hourly, daily, weekly cycles. And, if we could simplify the process of taking advantage of a massively scale or global Cloud to apply to those processes, the potential is enormous across a lot of industries. Bob talked about the agricultural industry and I think there’s revolutions going on in agriculture taking advantage of IT. So what if you were in the food production business and you wanted to get a really good understanding of your supply chain? The fields that were going to crops that you were dependent on – growing the crops that you needed to produce your products – you’d like to get an understanding of what the yield was going to be. You’d like to be able to collect data from those fields and those farmers either from agricultural drones or from heavy farming equipment that gathers temperature data, moisture data, fertilizer consumption, weather data for the environment -- anything related to the health of the crops. And this application might start pretty small. There may only be a few fields that have the data collection capabilities. But then that may scale to hundreds of fields within a region or a country over time. You probably don’t want to collect that frequently at the beginning. When you put the seeds in the ground, things don’t change that fast so daily records are probably enough. But as the crops get close to harvest, you may want to collect multiple times a day giving you an ongoing and continuous insight into the yield of the environment, which then could affect price, which could affect revenues and profitability for your overall business. Being able to predict that environment with a fairly straightforwardly developed application could be very powerful to business. This same idea can be applied in the industrial environment. To work with devices in the real world that could be anything from a highly complex, semi-autonomous, automated car production robot of which there’s probably thousands in the country all the way down to coin-operated washers and dryers in dormitories of which there could be millions in the country. You want to be able to talk to these devices. Most of these devices now produce some amount of telemetry on their own. You want to be able to talk to these devices at scale, gather the information, maybe do some local processing in the Cloud to compress some of the data down. And then use the NetApp data fabric to replicate it back for large scale geographic analysis of it – getting insight into trends on utilization, wear leveling of parts, exception reports and, in the case of the coin washers, how many coins have been dropped. Lots of opportunities to use the Cloud to interact with the real world and change the way your company talks to the world. The same concepts would apply to the information era, tapping into things running on mobile devices or internet of things or sensors, being able to have applications which can operate in the small and operate in the large in a scalable form to build out an application which combines the best of the hyper-scale or Cloud with the technologies that are familiar to the enterprise. So imagine the possibilities of being able to combine in these Cloud models together. Now the era of Cloud technology – it’s well underway. But the revolution and Cloud-centric IT and the Hybrid Cloud operations is really just beginning. Your future -- as an IT professional -- it will involve working with multiple Cloud providers in a Hybrid Cloud woven together operationally and wrapped in a fabric that unifies your view of the data. NetApp led the world over ten years ago to a view of unified storage. We’re leading the world to a unified view of data in the Hybrid Cloud with the NetApp data fabric. Now here at Insight as we’re at the beginning of this journey the dawn is always a great time to separate the darkness from the light. And our tech teams here today learning about the Hybrid Cloud, thinking what could be our best practices, what are the use cases – and that process will continue. To our customers who’ve joined us here at Insight I challenge you and I urge you to use your imagine about what this makes possible for you. How will the Hybrid Cloud be adopted in your environment? What could the NetApp data fabric? What could it do for you? How could it simplify your lives? How could it accelerate innovation? How could it make things more efficient? What could it let you do that you couldn’t do before? Because ahead of us all lies the freedom to pursue ideas that were not feasible before. And we are all here together at the start of this journey. We are all on the same team, and we want to be the team that you can count on to win. Thank you very much. So, with that, I’d like to introduce the president of NetApp, Rob Salmon. Thanks, Jay -- that was outstanding. I really appreciate it.