NetApp’s Cynthia Stoddard Talks Agile Infrastructure

Yesterday, at SiliconAngle’s continuous coverage of VMworld 2012 in San Francisco, the Cube hosts Dave Vellante of Wikibon and John Furrier, founder of SiliconAngle, spoke with NetApp CIO Cynthia Stoddard about some of her responsibilities as the CIO of a major tech company and her vision of agile infrastructure.

An organization is only as agile as its weakest link, Stoddard explained, and NetApp has been striving to remain agile over the years. For example, the company uses its own products internally to both demonstrate the long-term use of them and also show customers that they are the first users of NetApp products. Stoddard also said that NetApp is very interested in increasing its use of virutalization. It managed to streamline its business intelligence system to 2 physical environments and 24 virtual environments. The company also plans to move from two data centers in California to one in Oregon and will use virtualization for many more of its production applications.

NetApp also uses one its own big data implementations: an E2600 storage system with Hadoop. All of the data produced by a product is automatically sent back to NetApp in the form of metadata, which is populated into the Hadoop data structure. NetApp can then use analytics to examine trending usage and better support customers. Because companies can now analyze more information with big data, Stoddard said, they are no longer constrained by the size of their information sample.

Finally, Stoddard outlined her idea of the changing role of the CIO, who now typically comes from a business background rather than a technology one. A CIO has three responsibilities, she said. You can find out what they are and watch the entire interview right here.