Abstract: This talk provides an introduction to NetApp and it Advanced Technology Group through the lens of peer-reviewed publications. NetApp was founded in 1992 by Dave Hitz, James Lau, and Michael Malcolm (it was called Network Appliance at the time). Parts of the product were inspired by various academic publications and their interplay – including NFS, RAID, and log-structured file systems. NetApp, therefore, recognized the importance of collaborating with academia and contributing back to academia early on. Even as a startup, the founders published a paper on WAFL, the file system they created for NetApp’s storage appliance. Over the years, NetApp has advanced the state-of-the-art in building fast, simple, reliable, and efficient storage systems. We’ve also published papers on all of these topics and the talk will cover some of the papers “tapas”-style, describing the gist of each paper. Towards the end, we’ll also talk about the important research questions that we are working to solve, and would love to collaborate with academia on.

Bio: Lakshmi N. Bairavasundaram is a member of technical staff in the Advanced Technology Group at NetApp. His research interests include storage systems, file systems, storage and data management, and fault tolerance. Lakshmi currently focuses on storage and data management techniques. He joined NetApp after completing his Ph.D. in Computer Sciences (2008) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison under the supervision of Prof. Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau and Prof. Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau.