The Virtual Storage Guy

NetApp Ranked 5th Best Place to Work for 2011

I am very happy to share that NetApp ranked # 5 on FORTUNE Magazine’s 2011 list of “100 Best Companies to Work for”. Our continued recognition on the “100 Best” list is a testimony to our employees fueling our exceptional culture and propelling our customers’ success. This achievement could not be possible without the dedication of our senior leadership to build a model company.

Our 2011 “100 Best” award marks the 9th consecutive year that NetApp has been ranked in the top 50 on the FORTUNE list and is our 3rd consecutive year in the top 10. The FORTUNE # 5 ranking is a terrific accomplishment.

Our culture has been recognized worldwide this year with a record number of global and local “Best Companies” awards. In 2011 we earned the following rankings...

• #1 in Switzerland, Australia and RTP
• Top 5 rankings in Canada, New York, Washington, D.C., India and France
• Top 10 rankings in the UK and Germany
• #17 in the Netherlands
• #30 in EMEA
• #31 in NANE

These are all tremendous achievements and I am proud to see our strong global culture earn such recognition. Internally we will be celebrating and congratulating our leaders and employees for their contributions in 2010.

I'd encourage you to join us! As the fastest growing storage vendor we are aggressively hiring those who posses passion, talent, and the vision to create industry-leading leading technologies, products, and solutions while building a world-class company.

You may want to read the thoughts of Bart Richards, Regional director in our New York office and 10 year veteran, on working at NetApp.

I'd be remiss if I didn't thank our CEO, Tom Georgens for allowing me to share a number of his thoughts in this post.

Leading Change in the Storage Industry

One of the things I love about my current role at NetApp (beyond the great culture, people, and technologies) is the amount of time I spend meeting with customers, prospects, partners, analysts, and the online community to discuss the topic of virtualization and how it has changed everything from IT architectures to corporate business models.

Over the past four to five years we have witnessed data centers change at a break-neck pace. During this evolution the level of exposure around storage technologies has risen from gregarious, black boxes once relegated to a small set of applications to a shared global component of the cloud; crucial to the success of the virtual infrastructure.

The architectures and the bread and butter capabilities of a traditional storage arrays have changed significantly since virtualization became mainstream (which is I’d suggest occurred in June of 2006 with the release of VI3 from VMware).

Back then traditional storage arrays looked like:

• Various Distinct Storage Platforms were available for hi-end SAN, mid-tier SAN, NAS gateways, and backup-only arrays each delivering a unique set of capabilities
• Fibre Channel networks were considered by many as enterprise class connectivity
• RAID 10 was the norm for highly available, high performance applications
• RAID 5 was everywhere as it provided cost effective data protection for application with moderate performance requirements
• Storage integration was commonly defined as completing a validation test for a particular application
• Copies of Data Sets, whether used for disk to disk backup or application test & development, were whole 100% duplicates

It wasn't too long ago when some of the traditional storage array vendors disagreed with, and dismissed NetApp’s architectural design along with our vision that storage arrays should provide their feature set and capabilities across every platform.

NetApp dared to pose the question, 'Why should customers have to choose between a full-featured yet expensive high end array and a mid-tier array be with crippled set of capabilities?'

ITaaS with NewScale & NetApp

Cloud computing means that users have easy, yet controlled, access to shared storage, compute, and networking infrastructure with on-demand provisioning – aka 'IT as a Service'.

If you're interested in learning more about how NetApp and NewScale make ITaaS a reality then I'd like to invite you to join Jason Schroedl (VP of marketing at NewScale) and I as we discuss how self-service from a tiered catalog of storage options can deliver greater flexibility, agility, and cost savings.

Topics we plan to discuss include:

• Provide IT consumers with choices and tiered offers
• Enable self-service from a menu of standard options
• Accelerate the speed of IT through automated provisioning
• Secured shared multi-tenant architectures
• Driving down costs with greater visibility into resources
• Leverage the efficiencies of shared IT infrastructure
• Deliver on the vision of a dynamic data center

Webinar Details:

Date: Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Time: 9:00 am PT / 12:00 pm ET / 5:00 pm
Duration: 1 hour

Click here to register for the webinar