NetApp Insight 2018 – IAS Update and Demos

Hey everyone. I hope you’re all doing well as always.

NetApp Insight 2018 was last week and for the first time, I was able to attend. There was some concern that my wife might go into labor while I was gone, but the little one was nice enough to hang out through the conference. With that said, let’s review some of the IAS stuff we did at Insight.

IAS had a speaking session on Tuesday that had a solid turnout from attendees. The focus was on our updated Ansible demo that shows Ansible working its magic on EC2 instances and NetApp Cloud ONTAP. Shawn Hamby also did a great overview of Cloud Volume Service and Cloud Volumes ONTAP, and the benefits of each. We also showed a little demo on Ansible Tower and how the entire set of playbooks we had already done in Ansible Engine could be combined into a single Tower Workflow. I think attendees were pleased that the session was both informative and technical, and actually showed a live demo.

Additionally, IAS was in booth #305 at the expo for the first time as well. Conveniently located near the eating area and the NetApp Store, we saw a pretty solid flow of customers, partners and NetApp employees swing by. Attendees were able to check out all of the demos we have on Ansible, Ansible Tower, Red Hat Virtualization, and even a physical NetApp HCI unit that seemed to be one of the few actually at the conference. Most importantly, there was candy swag to hand out and a really cool giveaway.

Folks that know me can easily tell you that I love my gaming. There’s no doubt on that. So I worked with the IAS Marketing team to come up something awesome for a daily prize at the conference. Every day at the IAS booth, we had a chance for attendees to win an Oculus Rift VR System!!! 

While the big prize was popular, I think the NetApp HCI was actually the most popular item in the booth. A lot of people had not actually seen the guts of the NetApp HCI unit and hear about the deployment considerations and details that aren’t generally covered in sessions and key notes.

Overall, the show was a blast and our IAS event at the Skyfall Lounge in the Delano was definitely a nice reward after several days in the booth. I had a really great time and felt the show was a success from an IAS perspective. I’ll finish up with some a few special thanks for Shawn Hamby and Robert Nelson for working the speaking session with me; Drew Mogan for allowing me to attend the conference this year and giving me the time to setup the demos with Robert; and most importantly Ali Vega for a lot of the marketing around the booth, the session and the show (she is what makes these events really successful). And a final quick thanks to NetApp for having us at the expo and giving us the session.

Thanks everyone and I hope to be there again next year!

 

Matt