Chapter 1: What challenges do enterprises face with data movement in hybrid and AI architectures?
Most people don't spend a lot of time thinking about how things are connected. I know I don't. But today, we brought in a guy who thinks about this stuff all the time, particularly where hybrid and private cloud use cases are concerned. Glenn Deckhazer joins us to discuss his role at Equinix, where everything is connected.
Welcome to the Tech on Tap podcast. I love NetApp. I love NetApp because it's so fun.
I'm here in the basement of my house and with me today I have Glenn Deckhazer. So Glenn, what do you do and how do we reach you?
Well, I'm in the basement of my house too.
Are you? Yeah, I am. Is it snowing where you are?
It's cold. I don't know about snowing. It's definitely cold.
School closed for us because we're wimps.
They open the schools longer when it's cold and snowy up here. So LinkedIn's where I'm doing most of my social stuff today. I am on Blue Sky, but LinkedIn's where I do most of my industry stuff.
Okay, excellent. So you work at a company called Equinix, and we've worked with them in the past with cloud partnerships and that sort of thing. So what exactly does Equinix do?
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Chapter 2: How does Equinix facilitate private interconnectivity for cloud resources?
That's expensive, time-consuming. If you had a petabyte on-prem, and if you couldn't use it for whatever reason over a cloud, over in a hybrid way, NetApp can put up FSXN up in AWS or use ANF or use Google Cloud Vibes and project that data from on-prem to there to be used. and use it as long as you want.
Updates cascade up into the cloud, you're using your data up there, and when you're done, and you want to move it from one cloud to another, you want to fire this cloud and go to that cloud, or you just want to use a service in a different cloud that this cloud doesn't have, All I got to do is delete it, right? Or no egress, no time. I'm in control.
I have all the leverage over my data and I'm not subject to the price hikes where all of a sudden, if I've got my only copies up in a cloud or I've got two copies up in the cloud and they're killing me on transit costs for replicating and they decide they're going to raise my costs, I'm kind of screwed because it's going to take me a long time to get out.
It's going to cost me a lot from an egress perspective. There's ways to get around this and NetApp has all the tools that customers really need to bring that to bear.
Basically, what I'm hearing is there's this idea, this goal of a cloud utopia where you don't even think about it being a cloud. It's just I use it, I consume it, and I don't care which cloud it's in. I don't care which storage is there. I don't care which computer is there. It just works, right?
And that's kind of where the data movement stuff comes into play because that's what we can do on the back end so that you're not thinking where the data lives and what sort of round trip time I need to worry about and how many hops are there and what's the network bandwidth and all that extra stuff that maybe you don't want to deal with so much.
That's kind of where you want your cloud to end up. And that's what Equinix provides, right?
The message that we try to get the customers is that you need to know. You do need to think about all that stuff. And the folks I talk to mostly in the world of storage have typically not thought about that. And if you're working with a cloud provider, they're not going to point you to that because that's not in their best interests to get you to think about that.
But it is very, very important that if you're talking hybrid multi-cloud or even just hybrid cloud, it's extremely important to understand the concepts underpinning how data is getting from the network interface of your on-prem to the physical and virtual network interface of the cloud version of ONTAP, pick your flavor. And that really kind of alludes to how I got to Equinix in the first place.
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Chapter 3: Why is latency a critical factor in data movement for AI workloads?
Based on the business requirements and the things you need, we sit down and do all that and we give them, here's what it would look like. Here's your brain on NetApp and here's your brain on Equus. This is what your infrastructure would look like if you redeployed the network with us. Here's how much it would cost. Here's how much you would save or not, maybe. But here's what you'd be able to do.
And usually that's when we also start the AI conversation. Well, where are you going with AI? And the answer is inevitably we have no idea. Most of these customers are still looking for the answers. And that's really where I think Equinix and NetApp together can shine. You're not supposed to know the answers.
But when you don't know the answers, you want to put yourself in a position to be able to experiment, iterate, and then deploy. That's the strength, I think, of the two names put together.
NetApp being able to go and take data sets, consistently move them to the three clouds in first-party offers, which I think is really, really good, either doing it in a caching way or using SnapMirror, which is now one of the new things that came out that was at Insight. I was really excited about that.
being able to, in the core, have an AI data platform to exploit with AIDE and give your data scientists a place to work on, then you can then take that data and embeddings and stuff and move them to different places, allowing you to, Prove out value. Do it in the cloud. Maybe you've got to go buy your own GPUs. And let's talk about the edge as well.
I've got 74 metros that those 276 data centers are sitting in. So I've got an edge that instead of going to the far edge and going to an office, I can go deploy it at a metro edge at any of those places. Again, connecting over fabric. I can take this data that's in this core that's on an AFX cluster, let's say.
now curated through aide and netapp can go and reliably confidently push that data to any of the clouds the neo clouds or any of these edges over equinix fabric and by the way all of that can be configured through terraform ansible it's all api driven but you're in new york you want to go to seoul and start moving data over there we can have that done for you in five minutes
It's really that simple. And it will always be the least latent connection you could possibly have because it's on our own private network. And they're going to be long haul fiber connections that aren't going through a million hops. It's not like you're going through a big MPLS network or over the internet, right? Most importantly, you want to talk about sovereignty.
Today, we offer this in the US, Canada, and Japan, but we're coming up on other regions. There's a lot of reasons you don't want network packets going over national border. I actually just earlier today finished our interconnected podcast on post-quantum encryption. People are collecting data that they know they can't read today, but they know once they get the algorithms right,
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