NetApp - The adventures of a Storage Researcher in Industrial Labs

Why Should Industrial Research Labs Sponsor University Research

NetApp recently hosted its 1^st Annual University Day at NetApp Sunnyvale Campus. Top notch professors from Wisconsin-Madison, CMU, UC Berkeley, UCSC, MIT, UCSD, Harvard, UIUC, Waterloo, Indian Institute of Science, John Hopkins, and University of London attended this successful event. In addition, faculty members from Georgia Tech, Michigan, Stony Brook, and Duke wanted to attend but had to cancel due to scheduling conflicts. [Note: If professors from other universities are interested in attending the next NetApp University day then please send me an email].  During this event we got feedback from all of the professors that “NetApp has got it right” with respect to how it interacts/supports universities. NetApp provides a) research funding b) access to its internal system usage logs that provide valuable information about workloads, device failures etc c) equipment d) opportunities for grad students to intern at NetApp and e) most importantly, it allows its researchers to interact with faculty and students, and thus, provide access to real-world customer problems. As a result, NetApp’s reputation as a premier research lab in the storage field is definitely growing.

Now, what does NetApp get in return? How does supporting University Research positively affect NetApp’s bottom line? What edge does a company gain by supporting University Research because research results are publicly published and are available to everyone? Isn’t having a research division enough, why should a company additionally also support university research?

In this blog, I will try to articulate the benefits of supporting university research. NetApp advanced technology group brain trust in the CTO office had the foresight and vision to support university research. Supporting university research can help a company in the following ways:

• Enhances Reputation as an innovator: Perception influences the decision making process of most human beings. If CIOs perceive a company as an innovator, then this will definitely influence their purchasing decisions positively in that company’s favor. For example, NetApp collaborated with Wisconsin-Madison, UCSC, UIUC and John Hopkins to publish 6 papers in 2007 FAST conference. FAST is the premier storage conference which is attended by people from top universities, government agencies, and storage vendors. The positive press NetApp received in the blogs and magazines wrt to the innovations in these papers cannot be measured even in gold. Many CIOs were interested in these technologies and contacted NetApp as to when we will ship products with these cool features. In addition, many new professors now want to interact with NetApp, and also most top notch graduating students want to interview at NetApp. These papers were made possible due to our collaboration with the above mentioned universities.
• Access to top notch Graduate Students: A company’s success or failure depends upon the type of people it hires. The inability to attract top people for a prolonged period of time is the first sign that the company’s future is spiraling downwards. It is very essential to build relationships with graduate students from good universities if you expect them to apply for a job at your company. These relationships cannot be built over night. They have to be cultivated over a 3 year time span by meeting the students at their universities, inviting them to give talks at your company, collaborating with them on papers, inviting them as summer interns at your company. Professors happily provide access to their graduate students if they have a working relationship with your organization. The endorsement of a company by a faculty member positively influences the graduate student about working for that company. The “Google effect” sucked-in and made many top students unavailable to other companies for a period of 3-4 years. However, now due to limited amount of external publication (or lack of publication by many top grad students after they joined Google) by Google researchers and reduced monetary benefits in the post-IPO era, many graduate students are once again giving other research labs a fair shot.
• Paper/Patent Collaboration: As described above, funding research in universities make the professors more receptive towards collaboration with the funding organization. Universities appreciate money, but they appreciate “smart money” even more. Smart money means interacting/advising students in addition to providing money. This collaboration results in numerous papers and patents.
• Faculty Sabbaticals: Different organizations have different cultures and outlooks. The confluence of ideas from these different organizations can lead to creative positive energy. This energy if channeled positively can lead to many innovations. Thus, sabbaticals can be highly effective in cross-pollination of ideas.
• Influence Purchasing Decisions: In countries like India, faculty members participate in government committees that have been constituted to make purchasing decisions for different government organizations and public sector companies. If a faculty member has a positive view about a company, this will definitely help that target company.
• Invitation to Retreats: University retreats are an excellent place to meet with faculty, students and also researchers from other organizations. In these events, researchers from various companies usually keep their guards down, and they freely discuss new ideas and problems they are facing. Once again these events foster cross-pollination of ideas.
• Invited speakers: Faculty members are more receptive to traveling and giving talks at sponsoring organizations. The fresh perspective provided via these talks can stimulate the thinking cells in a large number of people in the hosting organization.
• Access to research results:  Many universities have a research consortium setup. That is, many industrial companies fund a group of professors. The results/patents obtained by the professors are available to the sponsoring consortium companies for early evaluation. The companies usually have to pay a nominal fee if they want to license or use the patents in their products.

• Opportunity to teach at Universities: Industrial researchers are invited to teach graduate courses or lectures at universities. I have personally taught a storage system graduate course for one semester at UCSC, and have given lectures at UC Berkeley. This is a great opportunity to interact with graduate students. This gives the company an insider’s track wrt good graduate students (who can be subsequently invited for summer internships).

• Access to Federal grants: Governments allow universities to jointly apply for funding in collaboration with industrial labs. This is another source of income for corporations to develop technologies for government. This same technology (with modifications) can potentially be also leveraged by the company in its products.
• Consultation Help: Companies can get consultation help from experts from academia in areas where they do not have resident experts. Many times companies get leads to expert faculty members from other faculty members who already have a good working relationship with the sponsoring company.
• Invitation to be on Program Committees, PhD committees, Journal Editorial Boards: Researchers in companies get invited to be on various committees. This is usually due to the existence of excellent working relationships with faculty members who are conference chairs or PhD supervisors. The presence of industrial researchers in these committees helps to boost the reputation of their respective organizations.

In conclusion, just as it is extremely important for a company to have excellent relationships with its customers, it is equally important for an organization to have good relationships with the top talent producing institutions of the world (note: it is important to develop university relationships with institutions across the world because no single country has a monopoly on creativity). As they say, “Great people make great companies”.  Thus, if a company does not have sustained access to good talent, then it is just a matter of time before that company becomes a mediocre “me-too” company.

5 Disruptive Trends in the Storage Industry

Folks, in this post I will talk about what I consider to be 5 disruptive trends in storage industry. By disruptive I mean things that if a storage company (traditional SAN/NAS storage controller/filer vendors) misses out on can potentially be detrimental to its bottom line.  The 5 disruptive trends (in no particular order) are:

1.   Flash (NVRAM technologies)

2.   Server Virtualization and Hypervisor Technologies

3.   Green Storage

4.   Web 2.0

5.   Cloud Computing/Storage Services

Now, I will briefly discuss why I consider these things to be disruptive (in my next blog posting I will list out the outstanding research challenges in each of these areas):

·       Flash: Cost of NAND Flash (SLC) technology is rapidly falling and it now makes the use of Flash to be cost effective in comparison to high end fast disk drives.  Flash provides much better random I/O performance than disks (disks are competitive for sequential I/O performance).  Flash has slow writes, wear-out, read disturb and program disturb problems. So, one needs to have software that can overcome these problems. Flash read speeds are not as fast as DRAM, and thus, it will not be a replacement for RAM.  Thus, if vendors can figure out how to put random read intensive data on flash, and other types of data on disks, then one can get the best of both worlds.  Another interesting aspect is that one can potentially put their entire working set in Flash, and thus, the IOPs/dollar and IOPs/Watt benefits of flash are extremely competitive wrt disks.  Finally, one can put 2 Flash SSDs in a 1 U server box. Thus, a server can potentially host its entire working set in a Flash. This development will change the role of a traditional storage box. That is, it will be used more as a secondary store than as primary store. Thus, companies which figure out how to best leverage flash at the host will definitely have an upper hand over companies that will simply use flash as just a primary storage or cache. Furthermore, companies that figure out how to store the right type of data on flash and disks  (hybrid solutions) will definitely have an advantage over companies that store all of the data just on flash or disks.

·       Server Virtualization/HyperVisor Technology:

o      Server Virtualization technology is allowing companies to consolidate their physical server boxes leading to power, space and purchase cost savings. This, in turn, affects storage companies in the following interesting ways:

§       Storage companies have to ensure that their data management abstractions match the management abstractions being used by the server virtualization companies. For example, a VMWare VMDK should match a storage volume, instead of forcing the users to put multiple VMDKs into a storage volume.

§       Hypervisor companies want to provide end-end management solutions. That is, ideally they would like smarts in their management software (like VMware Virtual Center) and they would want a common dumb storage (least common denominator) interface for managing the underlying storage from different vendors. So, the storage vendors have to re-examine the role of their respective storage management software. Currently, the storage management functionality in the Hypervisor management software is not that advanced, but that will change in the future.

o      Storage controller companies have to leverage the hypervisor technology themselves in order to provide advanced functionality to their customers. Some storage vendors are already running their storage controller software on top of Hypervisors. Hypervisor technology can be leveraged by storage vendors to:

• Run application software on storage controllers.
• Re-design storage software into finer grained modules for better fault isolation.
• Scale the storage software as the number of CPU cores increases.
• Provide non-disruptive upgrade functionality

Thus, companies that excel in better mapping their storage management constructs to the server virtualization constructs, and which can leverage hypervisor technology in their storage boxes will definitely have a clear advantage over other companies.

• Green Storage: During the past 2 decades most computer companies have been obsessed with performance because this was one of the few quantitative ways of comparing systems. Going forward, “Power” will become the next quantitative metric that will be primarily used for comparing computer systems. SNIA has already started to design comparison metrics such as IOPs/Watt, Watts/Cubic Feet, Watts/Gigabyte etc. So, storage companies will have to design power efficient systems not just for archival workloads but also for regular OLTP type workloads.  People are pursuing both pro-active as well as re-active techniques in this regard. Pro-active techniques like data de-duplication, compression, thin-provisioning, using high capacity disks help to cut down on the number of disks, and thus, reduce the power consumption. Reactive techniques try to dynamically spin-down or shut-down the storage devices to save power. New technologies like Flash will also play a key role in improving the power efficiency of storage systems. So, going forward, the companies that can excel in pro-active and re-active power management will definitely have an upper hand.
• Web 2.0 Architectures: Google wanted to use 1 U commodity servers as the base for its computation framework. As they were designing this, they realized that they can use the same underlying framework to also satisfy their storage needs because each of their 1 U servers had 2 disks. The key point is that they decided not to use traditional RAID 5 type protection mechanism. Instead they decided to use 3 copy protection mechanism with weak consistency semantics between the copies. Thus, Google was able to drastically cut their upfront capital expenditure costs by using the combination of commodity hardware and home grown distributed file system software. They traded cost gains for more advanced functionality offered by storage vendors such as better data integrity and reliability guarantees, better performance and better capacity utilization. This approach has spread like wild fire amongst the Web 2.0 companies. There are even some open source distributed data management software similar to Google File System such as Hadoop File System, and Lustre that are being used by many of the Web 2.0 comapnies in lieu of Google File System software. The combination of this open source software and commodity hardware has the potential to do to the storage industry what Linux has done to the server operating system industry. This is a triple threat for traditional vendors because:
  • Web 2.0 companies are not using traditional storage boxes.
  • Web 2.0 companies are starting to offer storage hosting services (while not using traditional storage boxes) to enterprises.
  • Server/Service companies like IBM/HP can storage service solutions hosted at the customer sites comprised of non-traditional storage vendor boxes.

Thus, storage companies have to package their offerings in such as way that their offerings have less upfront costs. This will then entice the Web 2.0 companies to purchase storage from them instead of building their own solutions. Furthermore, in future, if the Web 2.0 companies want more advanced storage management features, then the storage companies can provide this functionality and charge the Web 2.0 companies accordingly.

• Cloud Computing or Storage Services or Storage Hosting: Companies like Google and Amazon are starting to offer compute/storage hosting services to enterprises. Now, this trend is different than the failed storage backup services that were offered in the past in the following key ways:
  • Eat their own cooking: Google and Amazon anyway need large data centers for their own internal needs. They are leveraging this internal need to amortize costs for their customers.
  • Higher Value Add Services: They are offering more than just storage hosting or compute hosting services. Instead they are offering an eco-system where they provide database, security, file system, messaging etc services to their customers. Thus, customers can quickly build their applications.
  • Trust/Reputation: Google and Amazon are trusted companies that will not go bankrupt unlike smaller storage hosting companies.

There are trust/security issues, availability issues and performance issues that one still needs to overcome. Moreover, there are still no well defined SLAs being offered wrt performance by these companies. However, the convenience and pricing structure of these offerings is making people lose their inhibitions about using these services (similar to how people are using TurboTax to do their taxes and e-file them via Intuit).  The combination of cloud computing and the fact that the companies offering these hosted services are not using traditional storage boxes is definitely a potentially disruptive trend for traditional storage vendors.  It is important to note that the current Web 2.0 solutions cannot quite offer the reliability, performance, availability characteristics desired by traditional OLTP type workloads. However, over time, these things will be worked upon and will be improved. So, it is important for storage companies to assess whether they want to be suppliers (both low end and high end functionality) to these storage/application hosting companies or whether they want to get into the storage hosting game themselves.