I’ll keep this one short and sweet, NetApp Insight kicked off in Las Vegas with a slightly different feel this year. With the new schedule and no opening general session there hasn’t been a great deal to talk about, but I don’t think that is a bad thing.
Today has been more focused on welcoming everyone to the event, getting settled and ensuring people got to as many sessions as possible. I personally attended more today than I had planned, and my overall schedule is packed over the course of the three days.
My morning started off at breakfast with some of the A Team members as we discussed our content strategy for the conference and worked out timings for blog posts and tweets. First session of the day for me was around Containers and Cloud Volumes. This proved to be an informative session, I was especially excited to see more of what is coming from Trident and also details around NetApp Kubernetes Service. For those of you that haven’t seen this please take a look here and give it a go https://cloud.netapp.com/kubernetes-service.
Acquiring companies or technology is generally a complicated task and takes a long time to realise benefit, however to my total suprise at the time and what still amazes me now is just how quickly NetApp was able to execute on this new area. Announcing the acquisition and having the service live on the cloud portal the same day is something that is nearly unheard of in our industry. If NetApp can continue to innovate and execute in this way then we have a very exciting future ahead.
The first of the A Team BoF sessions took place and we had a great turn out, the audience reacted well to the discussion and posed a number of great questions for the panelists. Tomorrow I’ll be in the panel hot seat with a great team, I hope for a similar turnout and reactions from the audience.
After lunch I spent some time catching up with friends and colleagues, one whom I’ve not seen in a few years now, it is great to see Nick Howell back at NetApp and it was exciting getting to understand his new role and what he will be doing going forward. Afternoon sessions were around Veeam and their strong integrations with the NetApp portfolio, and exam prep sessions for the new Hybrid Cloud certifications. I shall be attempting these new exams during the week, so stay tuned for my thoughts on those.
We ended off the day with the Insight welcome reception and the A Team Beer & Bacon event. Both great oppotunities to network and hear stories from the other attendees covering their experiences and how they are solving challenges with the technologies showcased.
Tomorrow we can expect the announcements to start flowing with the general session openeing the day, I’ll cover all the important areas in my next post.
