NetApp - The adventures of a Storage Researcher in Industrial Labs

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.

Cloud Standards

I was asked to sub in as a co-chair at the 2009 FAST conference SNIA BOF on cloud computing by Alan Yoder. Mark Carlson from Sun was the primary chair person at this event. After this event, here are some things I am thinking about:

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Involve non-traditional big boys: Any storage standardization effort without participation from non-traditional storage vendors like Google, VMWare and Amazon will not be that successful. Thus, it is important to actively lobby them to join SNIA and take their input.

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Other Standards Initiatives: Any standard by SNIA has to work with the following other standards: a) OVF a virtualization standard b) SMI-S a storage management standard c) Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (CCIF) and others server and network management standards.

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Don’t standardize everything: It is not the right time to standardize everything. For example, basic data access protocols from Amazon S3 have de-facto become the data access standard that others are copying. However, other features like policy management, data auditing etc are not yet ready for standardization. That is, innovation should not be stifled by trying to prematurely standardize these features. [Mind you, policy management notions have been around for a while, but the previous efforts by SNIA in this area have not been successful].

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Government Regulations: Standards and technology by themselves will not be enough to bring order into the cloud space. Some government regulations are also necessary to ensure protection for customers with respect to providers going out of business, or what the providers do with the customer data or where and how they store it.

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End-End Standards: Ultimately the cloud storage related standards that SNIA comes up with need to interoperate with the overall server, network related cloud standards. For example, in some cases customers want to move their entire infra-structure from one data center to another data center (not just storage).

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Taxonomy: SNIA is correctly targeting to initially come up with an agreed upon cloud storage related taxonomy before trying to standardize different features. For example, there are different types of clouds like a) storage as a service cloud like Amazon S3 b) application as a service cloud (application is also provided by the cloud provider) like Salesforce.com c) infra-structure provider cloud like Amazon EC2. There are public clouds as well as private clouds.

Why NetApp is Number 1 for a Storage Researcher!!

You all probably heard by now that NetApp has been selected as the best place to work in America by Fortune Magazine in 2009. This nomination is primarily based on the feedback received from NetApp employees. Now, let me give you my perspective on why I think NetApp is the best company to work for in North America. I work in the Advanced Technology Group at NetApp. Our group is part of the CTO office and it consists primarily of PhD and MSc students from top universities/research labs in the world. My perspective would be relevant for aspiring Masters and PhD graduate students who want an industrial research lab job. So, here are the top reasons why I think NetApp is number 1:

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Get to meet with real customers on a regular basis: Every ATG member gets numerous opportunities to interact with real customers. This is a great opportunity for us to learn about real customer problems. Thus, it is not difficult to find real customer problems to work on. Trust me, this also makes for great problem motivation when writing papers.

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Opportunity to work on a diverse range of problems in the systems area: Many students have the misconception that in a purely storage company they will not have a diverse range of problems to work on. We work on problems in areas such as storage management, on how to leverage new hardware technologies, coding theory, new emerging architectures, and data mining algorithms. You name the new emerging technical area like virtualization, Web 2.0, new memory technologies etc, and we are working on those areas.

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Opportunity to work with product groups and make product impact: Unlike some other research labs, the work you do has a very good chance of ending up in products. Ultimately, there is no greater feeling than seeing your work being used by actual customers. You get guidance and feedback from product group architects on a regular basis. Usually, you solve a problem and build a prototype. Subsequently, the product group leverages your experience and they, in turn, build products or make changes.

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Support for publishing in top conferences: NetApp employees get an opportunity to publish both in an internal journal and also at top conferences. Our employees are collaborating with many professors from top notch US universities. We also have an excellent summer internship program where we get top students from top universities. NetApp has an excellent publication track record at reputed top conferences like FAST and USENIX.

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Opportunity to interact with professors and attend university retreats and conferences: NetApp employees get opportunities to attend university retreats and leading conferences. NetApp also hosts an annual University Day where top systems professors from across the world come to NetApp and meet with NetApp employees.

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ATG labs in multiple locations: We have labs in Boston, Raleigh, Sunnyvale California, and Bangalore India. Thus, people have opportunity to work in a geographic area of their choice.

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Proactive management and top notch colleagues: Initially, I was very nervous about leaving IBM research labs after working there for many years and moving to NetApp. But believe me, NetApp management is very proactive and pragmatic. They work very hard to make sure that their employees are happy and productive. Lastly, but most importantly, my co-workers are very positive and helpful. The atmosphere is very conducive for stimulating new ideas (a lot of patents are being filed by our team members) and for building complex prototypes.