James M. Burke

More and more Network Appliance employees and customers are starting blogs. This is very exciting news — I have added links to the ones I know of (Thanks Friea).

Ben Rockwood - Customer - Cuddletech Blog

Dave’s Blog - Dave Hitz, Co-Founder and Executive Vice-President

Eisler’s NFS Blog - Mike Eisler, Technical Director, NAS Protocol

Filer Jedi - Customer - The story of one man, and his job managing NetApp Filers.

Nerhood Weblog - Future Customer - Digital diary with topics about family, work, computers, technology, books and whatever else comes to mind.

Storage - Nick Triantos, SAN Systems Engineer

VMUNIX Blues - Customer - Mark Mayo’s Blog

I learned something new — apparently the founder of my company enjoys writing and even writes some touching poetry. In his recent post, Storage Haiku, Dave Hitz shares some of his “masterpieces” and mentions a storage haiku contest.

Check it out

Yesterday, Dave Hitz discovered that Network Appliance made the Fortune 1000 list for the first time:

"NetApp just made the Fortune 1000 list for the first time, coming in at #929 with $1,598m in revenue for calendar 2005.

Since we have such a high growth rate, I've always found it more useful, when doing market analysis, to look at our annualized run rate, rather than our trailing full year. In our last quarter, we did $537m, which annualizes to $2,148m. That would have taken us up to #772. 

What fun! Can you tell that I'm proud of my baby?"

Source: DaveBlog - NetApp Makes Fortune 1000 

Today marked my six month anniversary with NetApp! It feels like only yesterday I was making my post about my three month anniversary… Time sure does fly when you’re busy (and having fun!)

Filer Jedi reported that one of his filer’s (running Data ONTAP 6.x.x) was up for over 1218 days. He noticed this when he had a colocation’s cooler fail and only 3 out of his 80 filers shut down due to high temperatures. I don’t have the luxury of looking at autosupports and don’t know what the average time is for one of these babys, but 1218 days is pretty impressive if you ask me. That’s over 3 1/3 years — almost a quarter of NetApp’s life as a company!

Link: Filer Jedi - Uptimes?

Thanks Friea for the information…

The BayLISA March General Meeting will be held March 16, 2006 at the NetApp HQ in Sunnyvale.  This one is very interesting as two of the people from here in NetApp RTP will be describing their Kilo-Client 1000 Host Swarm.  Basically, they have created “what is probably the world’s largest iSCSI-based diskless server farm (1,000 nodes).”  Event Details:

IP Storage Today and Tomorrow
Speaker: David Dale, Network Appliance iSCSI Evangelist and Chair of the SNIA IP Storage Forum

This session will highlight the progress made with iSCSI over the past 3 years and how next-generation features such as multi-connection sessions and ErrorRecoverLevel>0 are pushing iSCSI into more demanding application environments. Dave will also talk about where you can expect to see iSCSI next. (hint: think departmental Linux and UNIX environments)

The Kilo-Client 1000 Host Swarm
Speakers: Gregg Ferguson, Laboratory Administrator, and David Brown, Engineering Support Manager, of the NetApp Engineering
Gregg and David from the NetApp RTP (Research Triangle Park) Engineering Laboratory will explain how they designed and built what is probably the world’s largest iSCSI-based diskless server farm (1,000 nodes). Alll server nodes boot from NetApp storage using iSCSI and can be rapidly rebooted to run various versions of Linux, Windows, or other operating systems. Because a single LUN is shared among many servers in this design, server provisioning is almost unlimited.

This session will describe the server farm in detail and discuss how particular technologies were chosen.

Friea also says that a video will be available after the event and details will be in the next Tech OnTap.

View: BayLISA March General Meeting

Working in NetApp Engineering, you don’t really get to see how your products are put to use. You know people are using your Filers to store data, but it’s always interesting to read customer studies. NetApp maintains an online library with a few of the studies…some of the customers include:

• Go Daddy
• Oracle
• Red Hat (HQ here in Raleigh)
• Ticketmaster
• US Army

There are many more including AMD, Arizona State University, BMW, Ford Otosan, Krispy Kreme, etc. You can check out the full list at http://www.netapp.com/library/cs/fulllib/.

On January 24th, I made a post about the “Looking Beyond the Obvious” event. Well, that day has come…today is the day of the NetApp online event. Paul Albright says “You’ll hear Dan Warmenhoven, Tom Mendoza, Dave Hitz, and Marina Levinson discuss how the disk-to-disk (D2D) backup product family will help customers “look beyond the obvious” and find new ways to improve their data management, D2D backup, and data security. Customers and prospects will be able to ask questions via a live chat program.”

Today, you may also notice various NetApp advertisements on the Cnet networks home pages. You can see them at: www.TechRepublic.com, www.news.com, www.zdnet.com, news.zdnet.com, and downloads-zdnet.com.com.

Anyway, if you haven’t registered, be sure to do so…the event begins in half an hour. The event runs from 10-11am PST (1-2pm EST).

The Obvious Choice: NetApp Disk-to-Disk Backup Solutions

I was reading through some of the recent comments on the blog, and found one from Mark Mayo. Come to find out, not only does he use Macs, but he is also a fan of NetApp. Yesterday, he wrote a post called “NetApp autosupport rocks.” This is a topic that I’ve been wanting to talk about for quite some time now. Reading Mark’s article made me proud to work at NetApp. Now, since I work on host side development within NetApp, I don’t get to see autosupport work in action (we disable this in our lab), because we do lots of things to these boxes and as such, we would drive the support team crazy. But, I have seen it in action in some of my training classes.

The support team takes autosupports very seriously, and Mark’s article is a perfect example. I encourage you to read his article here, but basically the idea is this: Mark added a new disk shelf to an existing filer. When he added the new disks, the filer noticed that the disks were previously in another aggregate and immediately marked the aggregate as offline to preserve data. It then generated an error to inform the admin that the disks are offline. Well, it sent out a few emails, and also submitted a trouble ticket with NetApp Global Support (NGS). He received a call within EIGHT minutes from NGS and they were ready to walk him through the process to “online” his newly added disks. NGS also received information that a firmware update failed, and they were ready to ship him a new part. It’s just another example of NetApp striving to be “Fast, Simple, and Reliable.”

View: NetApp autosupport rocks at VMUNIX Blues

On February 7, 2006, NetApp will be hosting an online event called Looking Beyond the Obvious.  The event will cover technologies and solutions available from NetApp, Symantec, and Decru and features topics such as:

• Enhanced Data Protection Technologies & Services
• New Disk-to-Disk Backup Solutions
• Uncompromised Security Offerings

Some of the key presenters include:  Dan Warmenhoven (CEO, NetApp), Marina Levinson (CIO, NetApp), Dave Hitz (Founder & EVP, NetApp), Tom Mendoza (President, NetApp), and Jeremy Burton (SVP of Data Management, Symantec).  In order to attend, simply go to the link below and enter your e-mail address — you will be sent a reminder email before the event.

Sign-up:  NetApp - Looking Beyond the Obvious Online Event