Glenn Dekheyser

So there was the idea I could put a physical NetApp close to the cloud, connected over this link, which at the time was maximum one gig a second.

You could do over one gig a second, but they were doing it to do iSCSI connections to run virtual machines in the cloud and run them.

but the data store is back over one gig.

Like I said, it worked for the things it worked for.

It was a great solution that was a little bit before its time.

Consider now that we've got 100 gig connections to the cloud in local metros in some cases.

You can make more by going direct, but the clouds typically put their switch infrastructure at Equinix to get close to the customers they want consuming.

So a customer that has Equinix as their co-location, has their compute, has their storage, has their IT,

core running at Equinix can connect to many clouds around the world, more than any other provider by a long shot, I'd say, by a factor of three or four.

I don't know what it is these days.

But you can connect there with very low latency, as low as you can get.

Sometimes getting ping latencies from your physical

presence to the virtual machine in the cloud lower than it would be from the virtual machine to the virtual storage in the same service.

So you can get somewhat parity on latency and then you just got to worry about the throughput and then you can get a lot of really cool use cases, especially with AI and moving data around.

We'll get to that, but you start to see why NetApp would be very interested in harnessing that power.

given NetApp's supremacy in data motion.

For a very long time, it's one of the things that I always exploited NetApp at great advantage for my customers, was getting data around in consistent ways that it could be used read-only, read-write, cloning, all the cool things you could do, and doing it efficiently with deduped and compressed SnapMirror or vaulting, or now FlexCaching has really become a big deal.

So the possibilities are endless of what you can do with this, but

To give you just another idea of the scope, Equinix has 12 metros around the world that have six public clouds adjacent to that metro.

And the six being top three that everybody thinks about, you know, AWS, Azure, Google.