NetApp at DockerCon – What’s that about then?

Background

On day 0 of DockerCon EU, I had the opportunity to listen to a presentation from NetApp and how their product suites compliment the Docker and container ecosystem in general. For me, this was an eye-opener on the value NetApp delivers to the market. Not really paying too much attention to NetApp’s product suite previously, I thought of them as just another storage vendor, guess I was wrong!

Whats that about then?

NetApp has developed and is able to deliver storage for Docker containers across all of its product portfolio, be that ONTAP, SolidFire or E-Series. The cool thing here though, it is all open source code they have developed to allow them to integrate their devices, but the code is available to anyone and free to use in the NetApp Github repo. Now it’s not just Docker, there is support for many other container frameworks. The Trident Kubernetes storage orchestrator being one of those examples.

I am not going to pretend to know how this all works as I don’t, what is nice to see though is that NetApp recognises that remaining as a traditional storage vendor will be the death of them. Contributing so much to the open source community is a great step. Being able to leverage existing investments in storage to deliver new services, is a smart move.

Further Learning NetApp Open Source

Also, check out the Tech Field Day Extra video from DockerCon for further info.

The Boring Bit

It would be fair to say that my DockerCon entrance fee, flights, and hotel for this trip were covered by the good folks at Tech Field Day through the work they do with vendors such as Docker and NetApp. However, this blog post is my own thoughts and in no way influenced by that. I am not obliged to write this drivel 🙂

Ian