NetApp had three of their customer innovation winners come up on stage for a panel discussion with Dave Hitz moderating the discussion. All three had interesting deployments of NetApp storage systems:
- Andrew Henderson from ING DIRECT talked about their need to deploy copies of the banks IT environment for test, development, optimization and security testing. This process took 12 weeks to accomplish the first time they tried and only created a single copy. They wanted to speed this up and be able to deploy 10 or more copies if necessary. Andrew looked at Microsoft Hyper-V, System Center and NetApp FlexClones and transformed this process to now generate a copy of the entire banks IT services in under 10 minutes. And since the new capabilities have been in place they have created over 400 copies of the bank (he called these bank-in-a-box) for various purposes.
- Teresa Wahlert from Iowa Workforce Development Agency was up next and talked about their VDI implementation. Iowa cut their budget which forced them to shut down a number of physical offices. But with VDI, VMware and NetApp storage Workforce were able to disperse their services to over 3000 locations now in prisons, libraries, and other venues where they had no presence before. They put out a general call for all the tired, dying PCs in Iowa government and used these to host VDI services. Now Workforce services are up 7X24 locations, pretty amazing for government work. Apparently they had tried VDI before and their previous storage couldn’t handle it. They moved to NetApp with FlashCache and it worked just fine. That’s when they rolled it VDI services to their customers and businesses. With NetApp they were able to implement VDI, reduce storage costs (via deduplication and other storage efficiency features) and increase department services.
- Jeff Bell at Mercy Healthcare talked about the difficulties of rolling out electronic health records (EHR) and their challenges of integrating ~30 hospitals and ~400 medical clinics. They started with EHR fairly early 2006-2007 well before the latest governmental push. He mentioned Joplin MO and last years category 5 tornado which about wiped out their hospital there. He said within 2 hours after the disaster, Mercy Healthcare was printing out the EHR for the 183 patients present in the hospital at the time that had to be moved to other care facilities. The promise of EHR is that the information travels with the patient, can be recovered in the event of a disaster and is immediately available. It seems that at least at Mercy Healthcare, EHR is living up to its promise. In addition, they just built a new data center as they were running out of space, power and cooling at the old one. They installed new NetApp storage there and for the first few months had to run heaters to keep the data center live-able because the new power/cooling load was so far below what they were experienced previously. Looking back on what they had accomplished Jeff was not so sure they would build a new data center again. With new cloud offerings coming out and the reduced power/cooling and increased density of NetApp storage they could almost get by without another data center at all.
That’s about it from the customer session.
NetApp execs spent the rest of the day on innovation, mostly at NetApp but also in the IT industry in general.
There was lots of discussion on the new release of Data ONTAP 8.1.1 with its latest cluster mode features. NetApp positioned it as fulfilling out the transition to data/storage as an infrastructure that IT has been pushing for the last decade or so. Following in the grand tradition of what IBM did for computing infrastructure with the 360 and what Cisco and others did for networking infrastructure in the mid 80’s.
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