NetApp Innovation Awards

Back in early December, I had the pleasure of being flown to NYC to receive a NetApp Innovation Award. To say I was honoured to even be nominated, let alone win one of the categories, is an understatement. I’ve always been a fan of NetApp, and have championed their solutions whenever they made sense. NetApp does NAS better than anybody, and the simple fact is that I’ve had some fantastic professional successes deploying NetApp filers. I was in some impressive company in my category:

How I won, I’m not quite sure. My nomination (sent in by the local NetApp SE) was largely culled from the case study I did with NetApp last year. It’s pretty standard “ra ra ra” material, but if you ever wondered how legit these types of white papers are I can gaurantee you that at least in this case all the words in the story are in fact mine, and I stand by them. Our relationship with NetApp has been fantastic, and so has our experience with the technology. They’re a real enabler of what we do at the Genome Sciences Centre. Anyhow, I thought this type of award ceremony was a great idea. Kudos to Daniel at NetApp PR for coming up with the idea. I hope they make it an annual event.

NetApp held the “gala event” at the American Museum of Natural History at the end of the NetApp Analyst Day, which was a highlight since it’s a very cool place and it was neat to get the award in front of so many industry players. I got to chat it up with some of the NetApp executive team including Dan Warmenhoven, Tom Mendoza, James Lau and Dave Hitz. That was cool but it was more fun to talk with the ONTAP product manager about QoS in the filer and on the network. I’ve felt that flexible QoS policies have been needed for quite some time with the power and speed of today’s clients and I was glad to hear about NetApp’s plans in that area as well as provide feedback on how I’ve implemented QoS policies on the network gear at our shop.

I had conversations with the other category winners as well, including the guys from Weta Digital (yip, the Lord of the Rings movie makers). The similarities between the Weta and GSC environments were pretty startling, right down to both of us bumping into nasty bugs in our core routers dealing with UDP NFS traffic. Good info exchange on which Linux kernel patches we’re having success with.

Overall though, the event was squarely PR in nature. The technical talk only happened over cocktails and dinner. Which is fine, but it’s not a lot of time to get down and dirty. With some of NetApp’s most innovative customers flown in from around the world, a one day round-table session with us and the NetApp engineers would have been fantastic. A missed opportunity for NetApp and its customers, and an important lesson for me: Always keep your customer’s needs above your own.

Nevertheless, I felt like a superstar and it was a blast to hit up NYC in style. I even got to grab a coffee with my friend Tania who I haven’t seen since grade 10. Thanks, NetApp. And thanks to the industry panel that voted for me.