Are Your Tech Skills Keeping Pace with These IT Trends?

Tech_OnTap — Thu, 18 Aug 2016 22:37:44 GMT

July / August 2016

Jim Lyons
Senior Technology Writer
NetApp

Some of the biggest trends in IT will be covered at the upcoming NetApp Insight technical conferences in Las Vegas and Berlin, including all-flash storage, converged infrastructure, full-stack automation, and integration with public cloud services. Each of these trends is redefining the role of storage specialists within IT organizations, and the pressure to keep pace can be intense.

This quote from a recent survey of IT managers illustrates one of the many challenges storage teams are now facing:

“Hyper converged and converged designs are driving a need for a wide range of skill sets across our infrastructure team. Because of this, I'm starting to combine my server, storage, and virtualization teams into a single group.”

The annual NetApp Insight conference is the perfect place to stay current with industry trends and sharpen your technical skills through a combination of classroom sessions, technical case studies, hands-on labs, and certification opportunities.

With that in mind, here’s a short list of some of the technical sessions available to those seeking to become “full-stack experts,” pulled from over 300 sessions and break-out events featured in the Insight 2016 event catalog.

Flash Storage (45 sessions)

Flash-Driven Cloud Architectures: NetApp SolidFire in the Data Center
This session compares and contrasts competitive all-flash and hyper-converged architectures to the unique SolidFire scale-out cloud architecture.
What's New: All Flash FAS and FAS Controller Hardware and Connectivity
This session covers the technologies used in new All Flash FAS and FAS hardware including the processing subsystem, high-performance input/output connectivity, SAS3 storage and supported configuration options. We will highlight key NetApp® ONTAP® 9 features related to these platforms, along with performance guidance.
Deep Dive on Current and Future Flash Technology
This session will take an in-depth look at current and future flash technologies. We'll discuss flash technologies on the market today, with an in-depth overview of the factors affecting endurance in today's solid-state drive offerings. We'll then move on to discuss industry trends, including recent marketplace changes for both 3D NAND and storage-class memory.

Virtualization (21 sessions)

VMware vSphere Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery in the Data Fabric
In this session, we examine several use cases that range from private cloud continuous availability with vSphere Metro Storage Cluster, to hybrid cloud disaster recovery with VMware Site Recovery Manager.
Hands-On Lab: Virtual Storage Console and VASA Provider for VMware vSphere
This lab explores virtual machine functions like backup, restore and clone, as well as datastore provisioning from VMware vCenter using the NetApp Virtual Storage Console for VMware vSphere. The lab also covers VMware Storage APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA), integration with NetApp SnapCenter and VMware Virtual Volumes (VVOLs) running on NetApp storage.
VMware on NetApp ONTAP 9: New Tricks and Best Practice Update
Back by popular demand, this session will discuss the new and updated features of NetApp ONTAP® 9 as they apply to VMware vSphere environments.

Converged Infrastructure (15 Sessions)

Storage and Compute Service Design on NetApp FlexPod
This session begins with a reference design for standard storage service levels using a FlexPod converged infrastructure running NetApp ONTAP. We’ll review a unique method for managing service levels using a key storage metric. Next, we’ll show you how to apply service design to the virtual server layer to create predictable service levels. Finally, we’ll show how to manage storage QoS at scale.
Starting Small with FlexPod Express for Remote Offices and Data Center Deployments
In this session, we discuss the FlexPod Express architectures, design considerations and implementation, use cases and workloads that are being deployed on this converged infrastructure. The session will also present how FlexPod Express can be managed with a single pane of glass using Cisco UCS Director.
Hands-On Lab: FlexPod Infrastructure Automation
Learn how to provision NetApp® FlexPod® converged infrastructure solutions in a matter of minutes by using FlexPod infrastructure automation. This lab demonstrates how a FlexPod can be provisioned from power on to a running FlexPod implementation, after providing just a few network parameters.

OpenStack (9 sessions)

OpenStack and NetApp in 2016: Primer, Overview and Roadmap
Two hours of all things OpenStack and NetApp covering all elements of our product portfolio, along with a discussion of our future development focus and forthcoming capabilities. No working knowledge of OpenStack is needed for this session.
Real OpenStack Deployments on NetApp: Customer Use Case Studies
In this session, we will discuss multiple real customer deployments and use cases, including infrastructure-as-a-service, database-as-a-service, and file services based on OpenStack Manilla.
Hands-On Lab: NetApp ONTAP Integration with OpenStack
This lab demonstrates how to use NetApp ONTAP with OpenStack. A basic OpenStack configuration is provided so you can gain an understanding of how ONTAP features such as FlexVol® volumes, support vector machines and logical interfaces relate to OpenStack storage services, including both the Cinder (block storage) and Manila (file storage) variety.

If you haven’t already registered for the 2016 conference, you can find detailed information here regarding the dates, rates, and venues.

Already registered? The Attendee Schedule Builder is now live! Be sure to set your own agenda since seats for the most popular sessions will fill up quickly.

article Are Your Tech Skills Keeping Pace with These IT Trends? in Tech ONTAP Articles

Are Your Tech Skills Keeping Pace with These IT Trends?