1. Topics in Storage Research
Rahul Iyer,
Arkady Kanevsky
Network Appliance

2. Basic Company Facts Headquarters in Sunnyvale
$2.07 Billion
Headquarters in Sunnyvale
Other engineering sites in Pittsburgh, RTP, Boston, and Bangalore
Fastest growing storage company
4 consecutive years of 30%+ growth
75,000+ systems installed worldwide
#1 in NAS Terabytes shipped (68 Petabytes last quarter)
#1 market share in NAS space (45%)
Unified SW architecture for diverse apps
HPC with ONTAP GX Cluster
On-line compliant archive with NearStore
Simple, appliance-like management
$2.0B
$1.5B
$1B
$500M
Revenue
Growth
September 18, 2018

3. Technology Highlights
2006
Scalable cluster storage (ONTAP GX)
2005
Decru: in-band data encryption
2004
RAID-DP™ disk fault tolerance
2003
iSCSI storage system
2002
Unified SAN/NAS appliance
2001
Near-line storage appliance
1996
Multiprotocol appliance (NFS & CIFS)
1993
NAS appliance: WAFL and Snapshots
September 18, 2018

4. Research and Advanced Development
One dedicated AD Group
12 members and growing
Dispersed across most engineering sites
Works in areas relevant to NetApp’s business
Charter
Finding solutions to fundamental storage problems
Working closely with engineering
Making a direct impact on products
External collaborations
Publications
University research
September 18, 2018

5. Advanced Development Group Research Areas
Clustering
Expanding the ONTAP GX clustered architecture
Virtual Machines technology
High-performance parallel data access
pNFS
NFS-RDMA, iSER
Metadata and content indexing
Exploiting FS information
Tracing and workload characterization
NFS and CIFS traces
Component failure analysis and prediction
File Systems
Data-centric management
September 18, 2018

6. Areas that need Investigation
Data and Information Management
Limited admin “neurons per byte”
Tiers of system autonomy
Manual administration
Manual handling of exceptional cases
Can we have a fully autonomous system?
Datasets
Define properties for data
Scaling out namespaces
Data grows with time
Need to stitch namespaces together
September 18, 2018

7. The End