2nd Annual NetApp University Day

The second annual NetApp University day on Feb 24th/09 was a big hit. Twenty professors from top notch systems schools from across US and Canada visited NetApp. We had profs from Harvard, Duke, Wisconsin-Madison, CMU, Michigan, Stony Brook, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, UC San Diego, Waterloo, Toronto (student), Tennessee, Georgia Tech, Brown, UIUC, University of Illinois Chicago, Johns Hopkins, and Cornell attend this event. Some other professors from MIT and Stanford also wanted to attend but could not attend due to scheduling conflicts. There were technical presentations by Steve Kleiman (Chief Scientist NetApp) and by CTO and Vice President Engineering of a cloud provider (not naming them for privacy reasons). There were lively discussions on various topics such as a) Flash b) Cloud Computing c) Virtualization and d) Storage Management. A lot of ideas got exchanged in the room and everyone learned something new. Scott Dawkins (VP NetApp Advanced Technology Group) also gave a presentation on NetApp University funding/relationship model. From NetApp's standpoint it was a great opportunity to get feedback from the professors about our university relationship model and our research direction. By the way, a byproduct of NetApp's university relationship is the joint publishing of 3 papers in this year's FAST conference with university co-authors. Moreover, one of these papers also got the best paper award in FAST 2009. Finally, whether we hire them or whether they accept our offer or not, most of the top graduate students from the above universities, as a minimum, at least interview at NetApp.