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.