Episode 414 - ONTAP Networking Updates - Fall 2026

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Networking is one of those things that everyone relies on. But how much do you really know about what ONTAP can do with it? This week, NetApp networking expert Richard Scheffenegger joins us to explore VLANs, IP spaces, TCP optimization, failover, BGP and more. And how the right networking design can help improve performance, security and resiliency. Welcome to the Tech ONTAP Podcast.

I'm here in the basement of my house and with me today, I have a special guest to talk to us all about networking with ONTAP and general networking concepts. And I could think of nobody better to do that than the man standing or sitting here on video with me right now, Richard Scheffenegger. So Richard, tell us who you are, what you do and how to reach you.

Richard Scheffenegger (0:55)

I'm Richard. This is a continuation of a loose series around networking topics that we've started, I believe, like four years, five years ago.

SPEAKER_1 (1:03)

We're just going to reset. This is the first one. I don't know if anybody is going to remember that. Maybe we'll still link to the other one, but we'll go ahead and just we'll say this is the new one, the first one.

Richard Scheffenegger (1:11)

No, no. We'll link to the other ones. Anyway, so I'm here based in Europe. I'm a solution architect with responsibility for the entire EMEA and Latin America region. And I'm specializing in networking, specifically coming out of the performance corner, but also resiliency. And with my past experience, I've had a very high exposure with networking technologies.

And that's really fruitful here to bring to the table.

SPEAKER_1 (1:40)

So whenever somebody asks a networking question, if I don't know the answer to it, I always either point them to you or sometimes to Elliot, right? But mostly to you, I'll go.

Richard Scheffenegger (1:48)

So the third one, there's a third member in this group, and that's the one that's responsible for APAC, that's Tim Kleingeld.

SPEAKER_1 (1:54)

Oh, there you go, Tim Kleingeld. Okay, so that's another good one, right?

Richard Scheffenegger (1:57)

And speaking of resources, if anybody wants to reach out and discuss these networking topics, especially the advanced ones, that we may not have time to cover in all of the depth, specifically, I'm reachable under S. Richard, that's the easy one to remember, at netapp.com.

And I'm always happy to help.

SPEAKER_1 (2:16)

So what's interesting about networking is, it's one of those things that everyone relies on, everyone needs, but not everyone understands in depth. I am one of those people, I understand some topics, I understand some concepts, but when it comes down to all the latest and greatest features and functionality, it really isn't very well publicized. So we end up missing out on some feature richness that we could be leveraging in our environments. This episode is basically designed to cover some of those things, maybe concepts that we don't know as well, or maybe things that we hadn't even heard about that we might be using in our environment. So to start off, if we'll go real basic, we'll talk about VLANs and VLAN tagging, and where it fits in ONTAP, and how it works there, and some of the use cases that we would use it for.

Richard Scheffenegger (2:57)

VLANs is a concept that has been introduced in networking technologies something like almost 40 years ago now, maybe 35

And the name implies a virtual LAN. So it's a layer 2 technology. You basically create on top of physical networking devices multiple independent layer 2 domains that really don't talk to each other natively. So you would have to pass through a router, a layer 3 device, to go from one VLAN to another VLAN. Or alternatively, you can also think of them as security domains, walled gardens within which a specific application or a tenant in a multi-tenant environment is living without having a way natively on the network to peer or to go across the fence and to impact by the else's data traffic. That's VLAN.

SPEAKER_1 (3:47)

Yeah, and you'd use it for segmenting networks that maybe you don't want to talk to each other, right? So you want to have that logical separation of those networks. Are there any performance benefits to using VLANs or strictly just for carving networks up into smaller?

Richard Scheffenegger (4:02)

Not really performance benefits. They are really more from a security perspective and maybe performance in the sense that you are limiting the scope of your broadcasts. So when you're doing a broadcast, for example, the most well-known, the most critical one that you can have in an IP network is an ARP broadcast, basically asking who has a specific IP address because you want to talk to the PN host, that is a broadcast and it's typically flooded. So flooding is the technical term here, meaning it's getting spread out across all the physical ports that make up either a physical network when you don't have VLANs or you create a VLAN on top of your physical network and then you limit the scope of this broadcast so it only reaches those clients that actually have a need to know.