David Hitz

Preaching the mantra 'Keep It Simple,' he helped bring the concept of storage networking to the business masses

CRN logo By Joseph F. Kovar, ChannelWeb

9:00 AM EST Mon. Dec. 11, 2006
From the December 11, 2006 issue of CRN
Page 1 of 2
Back in the early 1990s, Dave Hitz had an epiphany that would change his life: Sharing data across a network didn't have to be complicated.


Slide Show: David Hitz
At the time a senior engineer at Auspex Systems, which built special-purpose, proprietary hardware to serve up files that resided across the network outside the servers, Hitz and his then-boss James Lau were convinced there was a simpler way to handle network-attached storage. So the two struck out on their own to form their own company, Network Appliance.

There, they created a single-function appliance with integrated hardware and software that simplified NAS in much the same way Cisco Systems had simplified networking with its integrated switches. Today, the company is aggressively building out its value-added channel, and roughly 50 percent of its North America sales currently flow through VARs, according to high-level channel executives.

The difference between an appliance, designed to do one task, and a server, designed to handle a variety of different tasks, is pretty simple, Hitz says. "What's the difference between a toaster and an oven?" he asks. "You can make toast in an oven, but the toaster can only do toast."

Yet in the early 1990s, the idea of simplifying network file sharing was a tough concept to sell, says Hitz, now an executive vice president at NetApp, Sunnyvale, Calif. "We told venture capitalists about the technology," he says. "They asked us, does it do more than [Sun Microsystems' Network File System protocol]? We said, 'No, we do less.' We strung the VCs along for a year. We shipped product a year before we got VC funding."

While Hitz and Lau together moved from Auspex to NetApp, and co-authored most of the related Auspex and NetApp patents, Hitz was the guy who really made the idea of NAS understandable to an industry that craved simpler storage solutions.

"The thing so interesting about what Dave had to say about NAS and NetApp at the time was simplicity," says Clod Barrera, chief technical strategist for system storage at IBM, Armonk, N.Y. "He was hiding the complexity of storage from the user."

Barrera, who was involved in recent negotiations that resulted in IBM signing an agreement to resell nearly all of NetApp's hardware and software products, said he has known Hitz for about 10 years, often sharing an evangelical role with him on storage industry panels. During that time, Hitz stuck to a simple message and became known for telling audiences that since they already understood IP and networking, they could extend into network storage with relatively little effort, Barrera says.
 
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