RIP: NetApp Advanced Technology Group shuffles off this mortal coil

NetApp has confirmed it is closing down the standalone Advanced Technology Group (ATG) – an incubation unit that was part of the office of the CTO and once described as the "ideas factory". ATG, which sources said was the closest thing NetApp had to an internal lab, has fallen foul of this week's expenses purge that will see 5 …

[ThePhantom]

Citrix did similar many years ago after their XenSource purchase proved to be a lemon. Ah well.

[beepy]

NetApp's ATG group was started in 2004

Steve Kleiman, the then CTO, went on a 3 month leave of absence and gave me the keys to the T-bird. :-)

I started building the core of the group, and one fantastic hire was Garth Goodson (Sep 2004) from the Parallel Data Lab at CMU - then under Greg Ganger. I had missed Jiri Schindler the previous year's top CMU PDL grad, he had went to EMC - but we lured him to NetApp to work in the ATG group later. I could swear there was a third one in this chain, but we eventually grabbed John Strunk also from Greg's Lab.

The driving metrics for ATG were the Three P's: Products, Patents and Papers. The group was a patent machine. The work on latent sector errors (An Analysis of Data Corruption in the Storage Stack) was fundamental, and a collaboration of Lakshmi, Garth, Bianca Schroeder and andrea and Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau.

Good times. Good times.

Do links work - this links isn't long for the world... https://atg.netapp.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/0118-ATG_Conf_Pub_r4_web.pdf

[David 132]

Short-termism will bite them

Shutting down R&D to save a few bucks always works so well in the long term.

[Anonymous Coward]

ATG will not be missed

This group didn't do much... not much R&D came from there. Also notice that NetApp is a one-product company; anything outside of the core product line is met with stiff resistance from the rest of the company, including acquisitions.

NetApp's engineers aspired to become TD (technical directors), who were the most useless people at the company, with no deliverables and no accountability. ATG attracted folks like them. The TDs were full of arrogance, because they had "made it to the top," they will not be missed.

Surprised to see Beepy posting here. He didn't do any work in the last 20 years! Just rested and vested at NetApp. It took Pure less than 20 years to figure out he was worthless, and gave him the boot.