CarahCast: Podcasts on Technology in the Public Sector · Carahsoft

Next-Level Storage: Insights from NetApp

·44 min·2 clips

A NetApp customer cut model-prep data movement from 52 hours to six seconds.

1. CarahCast: Podcasts on Technology in the Public Sector turns to storage and next-generation data centers with Jim Cosby and Scott Robon. 2. Scott Robon is Kerasoft Consulting’s CTO, and Jim Cosby is NetApp’s CTO for Public Sector and Partners, so both speak from direct public-sector infrastructure experience. 3. The episode asks what storage, cyber resilience, cloud placement, and AI actually change for public-sector data centers. 4. Jim opens with NetApp’s three pillars: intelligent data infrastructure, cyber resilience or CIRES, and artificial intelligence. 5. He traces cloud from the mid-2000s “cloud first” era to today’s “cloud smart” posture, where agencies analyze workloads before moving them. 6. Jim says NetApp Data ONTAP runs across NetApp systems and major cloud providers like Amazon, Azure, and Google, enabling hybrid multi-cloud use. 7. He cites Department of Defense programs such as JWCC and JADC2 as examples of mandates that require data sharing across on-prem and cloud locations. 8. Jim says NetApp’s service design workshop is a zero-cost assessment that scans compute servers and storage and can show where workloads belong. 9. He says the assessment can save customers “hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars” by doing planning before migration. 10. On security, Jim says classification should come before protection because teams need to know whether data is personal, sensitive, or mission-related. 11. He lists NetApp classification checks for PII, PCI, HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA, and custom patterns, and says the tool creates red, yellow, and green status by volume. 12. Jim says the same classification process helps identify redundant, obsolete, and trivial data, which he abbreviates as ROT. 13. He says NetApp snapshots are pointer-based copies that can be created in one or two seconds and used to recover files from an hour or a week earlier. 14. He connects snapshots to SnapMirror, disaster recovery, and enterprise applications such as Exchange, SharePoint, SQL, Oracle, SAP HANA, VMware, and Red Hat. 15. Jim says Autonomous Ransomware Protection learns normal file-access patterns and can detect suspicious activity like Saturday 2 AM changes. 16. He says SnapLock can make snapshots indelible and immutable, and he notes that NetApp offers a ransomware recovery guarantee tied to that technology. 17. On storage efficiency, Jim says deduplication, compression, compaction, and tiering can produce 20% to 30% savings, and VMware environments can reach 80% to 90% savings. 18. The conversation on AI focuses on point-in-time copies, FlexClones, and the idea that storage can cut data-copy workflows from 52 hours to six seconds. 19. The tone is technical and practical, with Scott asking for concrete examples and Jim answering in operational terms rather than abstract strategy. 20. Public-sector IT teams, storage architects, and security leads would get the most value, while listeners looking for light entertainment would likely skip it.

As heard by us

A practical look at storage, recovery, and ransomware for public-sector infrastructure teams.

This episode treats storage as part of the core data-center stack, not a background utility, and it draws a clear line from public-sector infrastructure to cloud deployment models and the AI ecosystem.

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Why you'd press play

You want a public-sector storage briefing that centers recovery, resilience, and ransomware.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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