NetApp - On The Edge

Women of Vision Awards Dinner Tonight!

Tuxedo? Check.

Directions? Check.

Truly looking forward to the Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision Awards tonight! NetApp will be there in force, as will NetApp's student guests. It is a truly inspiring event focused on innovation, achievement, influence and change.

You can see videos of last year's acceptance speeches. I'll post links to this year's in a couple weeks.

P.S. Wow! What a night! Padmasree Warrior's keynote was phenomenal! Will post a link to video when it goes on line.

Linux Collaboration Summit

The Linux Foundation kicked off its annual Linux Collaboration Summit today. Jim Zemlin opened the meeting to a packed audience at the Kabuki Hotel in San Francisco and skillfully covered the opportunities for Linux moving forward.

He's pretty funny too.

There are continuations of the summit geared towards particular audiences through Friday. The summit required pre-registration. Unsure if it still possible to attend any of the sessions, it probably doesn't hurt to send an e-mail to the organizers and ask if you happen to be in town.

Inspiration

Inspiration - for a blog entry - can take many forms. Today it took the form of a venture capitalist.

For a technologist, Silicon Valley is a cool and sometimes strange place - and I found out a long time ago this was where I belong. The hub of innovation in computing, with engineers, companies, and infrastructure (such as sources of funding) to be found as no where else in the world. People have written books about their experience here. Through a couple of connections I ended up having a coffee at Caffè del Doge with a VC today. We chatted about - you guessed it, storage.

Storage is an exciting field to work in today. With disks getting big and cheap, coupled to continued innovations around storage efficiency (at NetApp that means deduplication on top of thin provisioning, RAID DP, and fast efficient snapshots among other things) people are storing more and more stuff. This stuff is getting increasingly interesting (for example, vast quantities of rich media being access on-line by millions of people). Leading to interesting problems in scale, performance and cost. And problems are what interest engineers. But storage today is not just about disks.

Our talk turned, no surprise, to Flash. Repeat after me "Flash changes everything." I had talked once before about drivers of innovation here, and one pure driver is technology change and disruption. I mentioned over coffee that Flash is a textbook disruption in that it is not a panacea. Large amounts of cheap random access memory changes how one views a broad class of problems. When the amount of direct access memory gets large enough, it disrupts the traditional storage equation. But the technology itself has interesting behaviors around wear and read vs. write performance. The bigger questions (from an investor point of view, like say a VC) are where the disruptions will occur in the data center and network, what will the future application infrastructure look like, and where will Flash provide the most customer value?

Again, I love Silicon Valley, it was either driving up to a sushi party in Oakland Friday to catch up with a lot of the original BSD crowd, or on our way to a Sharks game Saturday night (they won) where Steve Kleiman said that predictions about how technology disruptions like Flash will affect things are less predictions and more possibilities. And, engineers love technology possibilities. Because they provide fresh viewpoints to existing problems, and present in turn new problems to solve in exploiting the "new" technology itself.

Kostadis Roussos is one of our truly original thinkers here in NetApp. He stepped back from the trends in Flash and storage and came up with some basic conclusions on where this stuff is heading, and was able to articulate it in a fairly bold way. But that is a NetApp internal conversation. 

As I mentioned to the crowd at the recent FAST conference reception, there were a good number of students at the conference entering the storage industry at a time of great change. So many opportunities for innovation!

And Silicon Valley is a great place to be in the middle of this time.

In an example of poor planning on my part, I failed to grab a picture to post with this blog, so after saying hello to Bryan and Mark at Modernbook Gallery a couple blocks away, I went back to Caffè del Doge and ordered a cappuccino and took a couple pictures. In one of those Silicon Valley quirks, one of the investors in Caffè del Doge is a CTO from another start up success here. That made five shots of espresso in a couple hours - this blog nearly wrote itself. They really do make great coffee, stop by.

Best Paper FAST '09

A quick note. Alexandros Batsakis, Randal Burns, Arkady Kanevsky, James Lentini and Tom Talpey won Best Paper at FAST '09 Conference in San Francisco. Usenix now publishes papers on-line when the conference starts (because of generous funding from sponsors to allow that). Congratulations to all the authors! CA-NFS: A Congestion-Aware Network File System, to quote the paper, shows:

CA-NFS introduces a new dimension in resource management by implicitly managing and coordinating the usage of the file system resources among all clients. It unifies fairness and priorities in a single framework that assures that realizing optimization goals will benefit file system users, not the file system servers.

You can read all the papers on-line from this year's conference! How frugal is that! Thanks Usenix!

A is for Archive

is for Archive.

I read a recent NY Times article on the role of the digital archivist. Or should we more properly say the Digital Assets Manager, or the Archivist, or the Digital Preservationist? As one practitioner, Jacob Nadal, says he does not use the "digital" modifier to describe his job function.

Much of the world's documents and written material (of interest) arose before the digital age. Many preservationists today span the role of the traditional archivist and the archive technologist.

The benefits of converting traditional material to digital form are many. I found an older NY Times article I'd read describing the digital archiving of unique manuscripts in the remote monastery of St. Catherine's in Sinai. Digitizing fragile manuscripts enhances preservation:

Making digital copies for public use will help prevent regular handling of the originals while also providing insurance in case the originals are damaged or lost.

Additionally, digital copies of historic texts can make them much more widely available, as mentioned in yet another NY Times article on putting a Yiddish Library online. It was a joint project with The Internet Archive who has been instrumental in driving for digitization of libraries and collections in hi-resolution to make them available to more people throughout the world.

It's been raining this past weekend in California. Not a bad time to curl up with some ancient manuscripts.

Four Great Places to Work!

So, at the start of the Board of Trustees meeting for The Anita Borg Institute at 8AM today we went around the table and introduced ourselves. Poor planning on my part was to sit next to board chair Bill Wulf who turned to me and asked me to go first.

I quipped "Two days ago I was the CTO of NetApp, and yesterday I became the CTO of the Number 1 Great Place to Work in the US."

Alan Eustace, Senior Vice President of Engineering and Research at Google, sitting next to me said "Alan Eustace, Google. For the past two years we were the number 1 best place to work and now we're number 4, but we're not bitter."

Kathy Hill, Senior Vice President of Access Networking and Services, two people down introduced herself as "Kathy Hill, from Cisco where we are the sixth best place to work - but we have aspirations."

By this point we were laughing, in a very good natured way, and Rick Rashid, Senior Vice President heading research at Microsoft joined in the repartee.

No one thing makes a company a great place to work, unless you say it's the people that work there. The energy and passion that the member company board of trustees bring to The Anita Borg Institute to make a difference in providing career development opportunities, programs for students and recent graduates, and partnerships to improve their place to work is one reason why these companies are singled out for recognition and are successful in their business.

Congratulations to all the winners and people making a difference!

P.S. Four or more Great Places to Work perhaps? I want to congratulate Anita Borg Institute Partners Genentech, Intuit, and Juniper Networks also!

Baseball

Dave Hitz has written an autobiographical book primarily focusing on what prepared him to be a co-founder of NetApp and the challenges and successes NetApp had through its formative years.

I started at NetApp in January 1994, so I read a partial draft and the final copy from an inside viewpoint. I would observe that Dave has an engaging style that makes what is essentially a book on business readable.

It is with mixed feelings (which I didn't share with Dave) to see my name in close proximity to the word "chaotic" (and the single word separating "Brian" from "chaotic" is "is"). Dave does explain the Dungeons and Dragons reference (which was helpful to me) in the book. Because you see, this is a good thing.

I found a recent article in the NY Times about baseball player Rickey Henderson interesting and comforting. Realize I'm neither much into spectator sports nor sports analogies for business situations, but I am fascinated by nuanced strategy and balance of power. The book that really got me interested very late in life in baseball was George Will's extraordinarily detailed and well written book Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball. In many ways Rickey Henderson's style of playing is a strong expression of the skills Will identifies as needed to be a great player.

Tony La Russa labelled Henderson "dangerous" in a baseball sense. He had a strong hitting record and if he could get on base he could often flip that single into a move to second base and a clear sight to home. The opposing team knowing this had to adapt to Henderson - putting him in charge of the game dynamics everytime he stepped up to the plate.

The NY Times article went on "He [Henderson] also understood the value of getting on base and creating chaos."

I'll take comraderie and comfort where I find it. Maybe chaos is not a bad thing?

That said, I think maybe I better straighten up my office. My office mate John Edwards would probably appreciate it.

People

Carol Bartz was announced as the new CEO of Yahoo! yesterday. (Though not precisely true) I like to think of her as a NetApp alumnus because she is on our board, and I wanted to congratulate her.

The most interesting coverage I saw was a repost of an article from 1992 written one month after Carol became CEO of Autodesk outlining the challenges in front of her on-line in the Wall Street Journal. That article talks about the problems at Autodesk at the time, while contemporary coverage speaks to the success of Autodesk and Carol's role in driving that success.

Coming on the heels of my posting Monday talking of forces driving innovation, I felt the need to step back and consider that all my experience points to the tremendous impact people - individuals - have on the success of a company. Time and again I'm struck by this.

One book that talks about the impact people have in business, that I read long ago that I only have a general impression of now, is Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine. My memory of the book was of the carefully drawn descriptions of the people deeply involved at Data General, and their impact on a project to produce the next generation super mini-computer.

I was unable to refresh my memory quickly as there was no Kindle version of the book available for download, only old media support.

Dave Hitz has penned a book on on his career and the founding and growth of NetApp entitled How to Castrate a Bull (I believe a colleague of mine may have suggested the subtitle Unexpected Lessons on Risk, Growth, and Success in Business to avoid the book being filed in the wrong section of a library). Once again, we have a book that strikes me in describing how people were so fundamentally a part of the outcome that is NetApp today.

That book is available for download to my Kindle. It's a good read.

Innovation

I like thinking tools. Ways to consider a problem systematically that drive you to ask more questions and look at a problem in a broader way than you might off the top of your head. For example, functional specifications for a product. At many companies I've been at there has been a template for a functional specification with a section heading and a brief description of the expected content for that section. There is no one perfect template (so I don't spend a lot of time arguing about templates much) - it is simply a tool to help you think in an organized way about a particular task.

Innovation is an interesting puzzle. How should one think about it systematically?

Steve Kleiman is our Chief Scientist, and before that was the CTO here at NetApp (the role I am now in). I recruited Steve into NetApp not long after I came here because he is one very bright and effective engineer. Steve approaches problems systematically in a way that can engage other engineers to generate solutions.

Steve proposed a model, or thinking tool, for drivers of innovation which he calls The Three C's:

• Customers
  
• Technology Curves
  
• Competition
  

Steve feels that innovation, like many engineering challenges, can be approached systematically.

First and foremost is customers and their problems. I think in many ways this drove the fundamental conception of NetApp as a company that produces storage appliances. Before NetApp showed up storage deployment was considered fundamentally hard: hard to set up, hard to provision, hard to administer. NetApp tackled the complexity problem by simplifying the approach. This may seem trite, but NetApp decided to ship a product that was always configured with RAID protection. In 1993 protecting against disk failures was an option for other vendor's products, something that you enabled explicitly. Dave, and James, and Mike said "Why would anyone not protect their data, and in the most cost effective way possible?" RAID was enabled on all NetApp systems by default, simplifying storage setup and provisioning. We never run benchmarks without protection enabled, today running our benchmarking (internally and for external publication) with RAID DP on by default.

For an engineer, Technology Curves is very interesting. Kleiman fundamentally believes that major shifts in technology drive innovation. What I find most amusing about this 'C' is that it has the silent "Technology" in front. Disruption can occur with the introduction of an entirely new technology, or a massive shift in the economics and feasibility for deployment of an existing technology. Flash memory is a recent example of the latter - while not new, the prices (driven by volume consumer electronics, not by the traditional storage industry) have shifted so dramatically as to reestablish cost curves for deploying storage at a particular price/performance point. These disruptions present opportunities for rethinking existing customer problems in new and innovative ways.

The final driver is competition. This doesn't need a lot of analysis and in my mind follows the broader drivers of Customers and Technology Curves.

We have a tendency at NetApp to use the term Technology Trend now rather than Technology Curve, but I like the simplicity of the Three C's Model - I need that C.

The goal of the model is not to limit one's thinking to make you approach innovation systematically. We could engage in a lively debate on whether this is the right model, or should there be a fourth driver for innovation, or argue about the ordering. I'll leave that meta-discussion to others right now, more fun is actually driving innovation.

Fascinations

My apologies. I promised to write a series of blog entries reflecting on WAFL. And I have been writing them - several in my head. Editing. Discussing them with a few people at NetApp.

I believe this is known as writer's block.

I have been reading Designing Type by Karen Cheng. I have to make a confession - I am totally fascinated by typography. As a kid, I bought a small Excelsior printing press with three drawers of fonts from a friend for $25 - it unfortunately is long gone. Early in high school I had the opportunity to go to the Newark Star Ledger (a local newspaper) and watch what I recall to be their Linotype machine in action. Later in life I took an interest in small edition books from presses like Trillium (now Electric Works) - books such as Sandow Birk's and Marcus Sander's modern reimagining of Dante's Divine Comedy.

I'm slowly reading Cheng's illuminating text on the "general issues of type design." Because it is quite an enjoyable read. Spare in exposition, dense in information, and a model of clarity. An inspiration shall I say for me to overcome my writer's block?

I got stuck on the letter 'O'. I never considered it carefully. To quote from Cheng's chapter:

Designing a capital O today involves both objective and subjective rules. First and foremost, the capital 'O' in a serif typeface should always be circular or oval. Rectangular, square, diamond, triangular or 'free' O forms are not legible, since readers of the Roman alphabet have long been conditioned to recognize an O by its symmetry or roundness.

It proceeds from there for several pages with examples from the major families of serif fonts that illustrate the variety within the design constraints of the letter. It is then onto the letter 'E':

The E is the logical letter to design after the O. The E sets several critical factors for the entire font: the proportional system, visual centre, vertical stem width and serif and bracket style.

As I made my way to 'D', I was struck by the near inevitability of the design of a typeface once you choose the starting point. And the conceptual integrity that arises as you innovate within the chosen constraints of the design rules.

It struck me that my attempt at distraction from my writer's block led me back to consideration of the basis for the original design of WAFL. Dave Hitz reflected back ten years later that Mike Malcolm laid out three critical components that WAFL had to enable:

• RAID
  
• Write Optimized Layout (reallocate on write)
  
• Delayed Write Allocation (battery backed RAM)
  

Within these constraints, Dave proceeded to design a new file system. Years later, looking back, I was struck by the inevitability of what Dave created. And the integrity of the design.

Is this how you slip past a writer's block? Let me curl up with the serif capital 'B'.