I am Scott Peiffer, Sr. Director from the ONTAP System Manager Product Management & Technical Marketing team. Thank you to our many passionate customers and partners for sharing your feedback on System Manager 9.8. This post is to provide you with background on the changes being made to ONTAP, information on how to learn more about these changes, and guidance on how best to provide feedback to NetApp.
ONTAP System Manager simplification is to directly address your changing needs as you work to support larger data sets, with new applications while expanding into hybrid multi-cloud environments. The simplification effort has been data driven. Significant time was spent on determining and setting smart defaults based on NetApp best practices, automating, and simplifying many of the everyday tasks, and then prioritized workflows that were most frequently used. Since ONTAP provides AIQ with metrics on feature usage, we were able to understand what features our customer use most and what is infrequently used.
The feedback that has been received is being considered and prioritized. To be transparent, there are other items which will not be addressed as they are considered complex, infrequent, or unneeded based on our desire to provide our customers with self-managing storage.
We also hear analysts, for example Gartner stating by 2023, 60% of organizations will use infrastructure automation tools as part of their DevOps toolchains, and improve application deployment efficiency by 25%. (source: Market Guide for Infrastructure Automation Tools, May 2020). API driven integrations will be essential to our customers success. Anecdotally, we have heard in our virtual EBCs that many of our globals and large enterprise customers are managing their infrastructure with tools such as Service Now and Remedy, and even homegrown tools that consolidate service management across various vendors in their data center, all based on API services. There are a number of such tools that operate in infrastructure and application context that we are looking to support...
To aid you in this transition we have published an extensive set of documents here: https://community.netapp.com/t5/Tech-ONTAP-Blogs/Where-can-I-learn-more-about-System-Manager-9-8/ba-p/162249
Please continue to share your feedback though your NetApp account teams! This is how we can best aggregate feedback, address your needs and respond. Help us along this journey with your improvement suggestions.
Sincerely,
Ravi Chhabria (VP Engineering)
Scott Peiffer (Sr. Director ONTAP System Manager Product Management & Technical Marketing)