Episode 393 - SnapCenter 5.0 Use Cases

This week on the Tech On Tap podcast, Artie Noel drops by to tell us all about his radical experiences with Snap Center in the database world. Welcome to the Tech On Tap podcast.

With Justin Parisi. I love NetApp. Oh, yeah. Get up.

I love this company. Zipok! Zipok! I love NetApp because it's so fun.

Hello and welcome to the second podcast. My name is Justin Parisi. I'm here in the basement of my house and with me today I have a special guest to talk to us all about some extra snap center stuff. We had a snap center five dot oh podcast a few weeks ago, but now we're going to talk a little bit more and dive in a little bit more with arty Noel. So

arty, what do you do here at net up and how do we reach you? I'm a solutions architect that is a fancy way of saying I work with their customers on how they integrate on tap solutions with their VMware and SQL environments. And I can be reached at either arty.noel at netapp.com or you can hit me up on Twitter

or ex formerly known as Twitter or LinkedIn looking for at arty on tap or arty noel. All right. Excellent. And I noticed you have a picture of yourself in your zoom here.

It's you doing a sick rail grind. You still do this? Yeah, that was actually last year, just before Insight. I got in by the Insight people because they were like,

don't get hurt. You had never get hurt. And then you show up with a broken leg. Broken leg, yeah.

Yeah, it was fun. But yeah, I actually skate pretty frequently. And if you see my LinkedIn profile, you'll actually see a little bit about that on there.

Awesome. Are the shoes Etnees? Where are those? They are.

Those are actually Ryan Sheckler's signature model Etnees. I got some skate knowledge. I don't really skate.

And that's actually the box I'm on is actually painted up to be an S shoe box. So there you go. Yeah. I'm only knowledgeable of the culture.

I don't actually skate because that would be a disaster. That's what my wife says every time she comes outside and sees me. All right. Excellent.

So like I said, we're here to talk about snap center. And I think I've got a challenge for you. So I want you to do your best to tie snap center to skating. Let's see if you can do it.

Okay. It's a little twist. If you can't, that's fine. No, I absolutely can't.

It's kind of funny that you mentioned that because it's actually what I tried to do last year at one of the inside presentations I did. So when you said try, did you fail? Actually it was a joint presentation.

So the two guys were not skateboarders and therefore every time I would make a skating reference, they would look at me like crickets. Oh yeah, yeah, that's true. Especially when you start dealing with the international crowd because they're not

is up on the skating. there are a lot of international skaters and you see it in the X games, but you know this usually it falls flat with the international crowd usually it's like like I told an Easter egg joke or an Easter egg hunt joke to one of our colleagues from Amsterdam and he was like what? I'm like oh you know you don't understand that reference I see that now.

Yeah. So one of the ways that I do that is it is our secret sauce. It is our cheat code, right? Snapsender is NetApp's cheat code to be able to do some really sick and cool stuff within storage. We can leverage that to create these application consistent backup points or recovery points.

I like to say recovery points more than backup because real backup people can go, But you don't have this and look at whatever. But our snapshots provide a really interesting capability in the fact that they are instantaneous recovery points.

And I liken them to like the Tony Hawk of snapshots. Everybody wants to be like on top snapshots, but nobody has all the same capability as an on tap snapshot. So how am I doing so far?

Pretty good. Pretty good. So would you say everyone else's snapshots are like the Sean whites? Like they're good at other things like snowboarding, but not great at skateboarding. Right. I would say that that's probably a fair assessment.

Yeah, there you go. See, I can do this too. All right, continue. So you've done a couple of different SNAP Center focused podcasts before. And the one that you did with the SNAP Center product team last month was actually really good.

They mentioned all the cool new stuff that we're doing with SNAP Center 5. And even got into the fact that the development cycle and refresh capability around SNAP going to be increasing and picking up as they continue to deliver more features.

But one of the things that was just kind of barely touched on while SnapCenter does this great capability of providing us to recovery points, in my opinion, one of the really cool things it does

is it provides workflows to orchestrate and automate cloning. And when I say that, I mean from both a virtual machine and a database perspective.

Now it has a significant amount of value you in the database space. It does so in a couple of different ways. One, it leverages our built-in FlexClone capability

in the on-tap controller to create a space or a capacity efficient clone of your database and automatically surface it all the way up into your database management system,

whether it be SQL Server or Oracle or SAP HANA or pick one of your other databases, whether it be MySQL or NoSQL or Postgres or what have you.

I tend to talk mostly from the Microsoft SQL perspective because that's one of my areas of focus, but it is important to note that most of these things that Snapsnare can do can be applied across

all of these different database technologies. Within the cloning capability that tends to have a lot of value and drive a lot of conversation with the folks that leverage on tap in their day-to-day

large. And the reason for that is because in the event that they have the need to have multiple copies of the same database, they can leverage these clones

and present them to any number of, say, SQL servers and leverage them in different ways. So if you have a need to create a different development environment or a different testing environment,