NetApp - On The Edge

Linux Kernel Summit 2009

Linux is the new monopoly, in a good way.

The comment was made this morning at the Linux Kernel Summit in Tokyo during a discussion about embedded Linux. It was coupled with the assertion that Linux is or soon will be the dominant operating systems in all segments of the market except the desktop. I have no way of supporting or refuting that, but to even make the statement and then inspect it for accuracy means that Linux has gone completely mainstream. Gone are the debates of when will people adopt Linux. That is so last century.

It is likely that the TV you have today is running Linux. The discussion this morning was not whether it was running Linux but which version and why - and the challenge of maintaining patch sets for these embedded use cases. TV manufacturers are conservative - older stable kernels perhaps more prevalent here. Cell phones are more likely to be running more recent kernels.

Power management is a hot topic for embedded applications (as an aside, California is poised on passing a law requiring lower power footprints for HDTVs). More recent Linux kernels have increasingly sophisticated power management support. I love quantitative performance presentations (sadly, sometimes I see presentations on performance where measures and numbers are MIA). Boot times for embedded Linux are being driven down with analysis on where time is being spent during the boot process (a bit over 2 seconds for a TV to fire up).

An increasingly popular embedded Linux solution is the Android mobile operating system from Google. Google has the heft in the market to draw a lot of support for an open operating system for mobile phones. 

While the open source movement is not synonymous with Linux, Linux is certainly extraordinarily visible. A lighting rod for disputes on patents and licensing, backed by every major computer company still standing. All of this is irrelevant to this meeting. The kernel maintainers and key developers are gathered here for a high bandwidth face-to-face to sync up and set agendas for the coming year. And talk about the development methods around Linux.

The afternoon sessions are about to start, and there are more performance topics on the agenda. 

NetApp is a proud sponsor of the Linux Kernel Summit. We participate in part with our contributions to the NFS code in Linux, and other areas.

Grace Hopper Conference 2009

I'm sitting in the Technical Executive Forum at the Grace Hopper Conference discussing factors contributing to career success for women in technology. The consensus seems to be that there are still numbers not adding up on women entering technology as a career. Issues of networking within a company, mentors for new college grads, coaching on career path and advancement.

Of course these issues span all groups. But for less represented groups in an organization perhaps the support structures are not there to tip the scales towards a successful and rewarding career. 

Thinking about this, discussing with other members of the Anita Borg Institute. At NetApp we're exploring some group specific communities such as for our Women Engineers on-line community, and Women in Technology forums in each of our development centers. 

We're feeling our way forward on this. Always looking for ideas here.

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!

FAST '08 Conference - approaching ... fast!

The File and Storage Technologies conference is a pre-eminent conference for storage designers and researchers held once a year. The FAST '08 conference is nearly upon us! It will be held again in San Jose, CA, February 26–29, 2008.

I have to say I'm particularly excited about this year's conference - 6 of the 21 refereed papers to be presented are from Network Appliance and our university research partners. As a technologist at the most cutting edge storage company in the industry, this really puts a spring in my step.

Check it out:

The program:

Pergamum: Replacing Tape with Energy Efficient, Reliable, Disk-Based Archival Storage

AWOL: Adaptive Write Optimizations in Linux

Is Disk the Dominant Contributor for Storage Subsystem Failures? A Comprehensive Study of Failure Characteristics

Parity Lost and Parity Regained

An Analysis of Data Corruption in the Storage Stack

SWEEPER: An Efficienty Disaster Recovery Point Identification Mechanism

What's really great about these six papers is that the authors are comprised of NetApp developers, some very bright students from several universities who interned at NetApp and university researchers. We have a great intern program at NetApp - and the students always bring a sense of enthusiasm and vibrancy to the Advanced Technology Group reporting into me.

I really hope to see you at the conference - it's always a great time - with an opportunity to meet with storage engineers and discuss where we are - and more importantly - where we are going.

See you there!

P.S. In response to availability of papers. As far as I understand it, full access to the papers on the Usenix site requires a Usenix membership for one year following the conference - which can be as low as $45 per year for a student membership. After one year the papers are available for free to one and all (for example - all the FAST 2007 papers seem to be online now). Usenix needs membership money to run, and I assume the one year incentive to become a member helps them make ends meet.

So, expect the same for the FAST 2008 conference. That said, I would note that there are often related papers on the university sites for the papers submitted to FAST. And there are other conferences more aggressive about posting their papers quickly such as SOSP 2007 - and if you follow the links off the technical program page - you can eventually access such gems as this paper on Dynamo.

Finally, the ATG Group is organizing NetApp submitted papers to conferences over the next couple months to post as quickly as possible (per the various agreements with refereed conferences and journals) on our web site - I'll update this information when we go live with that publication effort.

P.P.S. FAST is this coming Monday - and I would note that we just had John Strunk start at NetApp, co-author of a seventh FAST paper written while at CMU - "Using Utility to Provision Storage Systems".