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Founder and Executive Vice President, Network Appliance
As executive vice president, David Hitz is responsible for the future strategy and direction of Network Appliance. Dave Hitz and James Lau founded Network Appliance in 1992 with a desire to simplify storage the way Cisco simplified networking. Hitz and Lau believed that general-purpose computing systems were too complex, so they built dedicated devices called appliances. These appliances were designed to do one thing well: storage. Thus, the word appliance was inserted into the company name. Prior to this, Hitz worked as a senior engineer at Auspex Corporation, an enterprise storage solutions provider, where he was responsible for file systems and microkernel design. He also held engineering positions at MIPS Computer, focusing on file system and I/O subsystem design for the System V kernel development effort. Before his career in the computer industry, Hitz worked as a cowboy, where he got valuable management experience by herding, branding, and castrating cattle. Hitz holds a bachelor's degree in computer science and electrical engineering from Princeton University.
November 22, 2006
Networking
There's an old saying in computer science:Fast, cheap, reliable—choose any two.The point is that these goals are in conflict. Improving one tends to hurt the others. Sometimes a new technology paradigm lets you improve all three at once, but within the new paradigm there will still be a conflict between the three.
November 14, 2006
Networking
This is a follow-up to my recent blog on How VMware is Revolutionizing Data Centers . Two weeks ago at Oracle OpenWorld, I talked with one customer who detailed exactly what he's accomplished so far with VMware. A second customer explained why VMware won't help his application at all.
October 20, 2006
/techtalk/ / Networking
VMware may be the acquisition of the decade. Brilliant move by EMC .
October 13, 2006
Networking
There is an interesting relationship between the bandwidth of the human optic nerve and the evolution of computer architectures. Early timeshare systems had way too little bandwidth between the computer and the user. Way, way less than the bandwidth of my eye. As a kid, I remember playing the computer game Star Trek on a 300 baud modem. The "long range scan" was painfully slow, even though all it ...
August 10, 2006
/techtalk/ / Networking
An earlier blog entry focused on virtualization in general. This one focuses on storage virtualization. You can virtualize at many levels:Disk-level—cutting disks apart, gluing them together, cloning, thin provisioning.Homogeneous Systems—virtualization spanning multiple systems with the same architecture ( Isilon OneFS , Equallogic , ONTAP GX ).Heterogeneous Systems—virtualization spanning multip...
July 25, 2006
/thinkingoutloud/ / Networking
There are two ways to identify potential network appliances. I won't claim we used these techniques when we started NetApp; I understand appliances much better now than I did then.Appliance-ize Hardware Components
July 13, 2006
/thinkingoutloud/ / Networking
Lately I've been hanging out with marketing folks, and I'm learning their language. That's scary for an ex-engineer, because to engineers, "marketing speak" means "meaningless double-talk". But having spent more time with these folks, I'm realizing that they are often onto some subtle and interesting issues.
June 16, 2006
/techtalk/ / Networking
This Monday we released ONTAP GX, which is a super-high performance clustered version of our software. GX combines Data ONTAP with the technology from our Spinnaker acquisition in 2003. Since you can read about how great GX is from our press release , web site , and in trade press (more press , and more ), I'll talk about the big picture.
May 19, 2006
/techtalk/ / Networking
Last week's launch included a major overhaul of our Data Manageability Software Family . I'd like to dig into our strategy there. (The launch also included a new high-end storage system, the FAS6000 series , but instead of covering that myself, I'll refer you to Tony Asaro's ComputerWorld blog . Summary: He likes it.)
May 12, 2006
/thinkingoutloud/ / Networking
Most product launches are primarily about the cool new products a company is just shipping. Our launch earlier this week was different—it is mostly about a strategy that we've been working towards since the late nineties.
April 5, 2006
Dave Hitz, Founder and Executive Vice President