Episode 402 - NetApp FlexGroup: Advanced Capacity Balancing

This week on the Tech ONTAP Podcast, we sit down with global AI and digital transformation strategist Kamales Lardi to explore one of the most important conversations in modern IT: how to adopt AI responsibly, ethically, and effectively in the enterprise — with data at the core. While AI capabilities continue to expand, most organizations still struggle with real-world implementation, scaling beyond pilots, and building trust within the business. Kamales shares why AI strategy must start with people, data governance, and business outcomes — not just tools and hype.

🚀 This week on the Tech ONTAP Podcast: We’re talking all things StorageGRID 12.0 — and this release is a game changer for AI and data-driven workloads. We are joined by Vishnu Vardhan and Morgan Mears to unpack how StorageGRID is evolving into an AI-ready object storage powerhouse. Here’s what’s new in StorageGRID 12.0 👇
 💾 Bucket Branches – Think Git for data. Instantly create space-efficient dataset copies for AI/ML training, testing, and version control.
 ⚡ Caching Load Balancers – Bring data closer to compute with up to 1.2PB of local cache for high-performance AI pipelines.
 📈 Scalability & Smarter Metadata – Handle hundreds of billions of objects with ease.
 ☁️ Flexible Deployment – Run StorageGRID your way: appliance, container, or virtualized. Whether you’re building data lakes, training large language models, or managing global datasets, StorageGRID 12.0 helps you scale with performance, simplicity, and efficiency.

🚀 This week on the Tech ONTAP Podcast: NetApp Docs goes AI! We sit down with Aksel Davis, Grant Glass, Jen Kaufman, and Adam Newton to explore how NetApp is transforming documentation—from static PDFs to a living, searchable, AI-powered ecosystem. 💡 Topics we cover: • The shift from closed XML systems to GitHub + open standards • How generative AI powers Doc the Owl, our chatbot trained on 120K+ NetApp documents • Making documentation more accurate, agile, and accessible in 9 languages • Future possibilities: AI-driven authoring tools, in-product assistance, and cross-dataset intelligence Whether you’re a NetApp customer, partner, or just curious about how AI reshapes technical documentation, this episode is packed with insights.

We’re diving deep into AI at scale with NetApp experts Bobby Oomen and David Arnette. From NVIDIA SuperPod (think AI factories powering massive LLM training) to FlexPod solutions that bring inference into everyday enterprise workloads, we unpack what’s happening at the cutting edge of AI infrastructure. You’ll hear how NetApp and NVIDIA are collaborating to solve one of AI’s biggest challenges—data management—with tools like SnapMirror, FlexCache, and FlexClone. We also explore why inference is becoming just as important (if not more) than training, and what that shift means for enterprises looking to integrate AI into their operations. Whether you’re curious about NVIDIA Cloud Partner (NCP) offerings, KV cache innovations, or how Cisco and NetApp are pushing FlexPod into the AI era, this episode is packed with insights you won’t want to miss. Tune in to learn how enterprises can scale AI securely, efficiently, and flexibly—with NetApp at the core.

Managing large amounts of data can be challenging, especially when you also have to manage the storage system where the data lives. So to make life easier for storage administrators, NetApp offers a data ops toolkit that can offload some of the work associated with storage management. On this Tech ONTAP Podcast episode, we welcome the creator of the toolkit, Michael Oglesby, to talk about the latest updates and where best to use it.

The NetApp Customer Proof of Concept lab is a place where prospective NetApp customers can "kick the tires" on real NetApp hardware, with their own workloads, before purchasing. This try and buy approach is a game changer for anyone looking to move to a new storage platform. This week, the CPOC team tells us all about how they do things in this inaugural video edition of the Tech ONTAP podcast!

Did you know there's a way to stripe large files across multiple nodes in a NetApp ONTAP cluster now? NetApp TME John Lantz drops by to drop some knowledge on Advanced Capacity Balancing!

This week, NetApp FlexCache TME drops in to discuss the latest information around the sparse caching feature for NFS and SMB workloads - FlexCache.

The NetApp A-Team drops by to chat about the NetApp launch announcements for February 2025. Listen as we cover updates to the ASA platform, new hardware models, BlueXP improvements and more!

The healthcare industry has long been known for its cautious approach to technology, but the COVID-19 pandemic forced a dramatic shift. In this episode, Scott Charles from T-Systems ([email protected]), and Brian O’Mahony from NetApp ([email protected]), break down how the healthcare sector has evolved in response to the pandemic and the role technology plays in this transformation.