Interlude - Index of

32 | Beginnings
We had a lucky disaster one morning when the entire engi-
neering department—meaning all three of us—walked in to
find that the Sun system where we stored our work had died.
We expected to spend the day recovering from backup tapes,
but then we remembered that for testing we had been copying
all of our data to a prototype named Maytag. (We named all
of our prototypes after household appliances.) Maytag became
our primary storage system from then on, which gave us an
excellent user’s-eye view of our product and even more incentive
to make sure that it worked well. In the computer industry,
this is called self-hosting, or more colorfully, eating your own
dog food. Moving onto Maytag probably allowed us to ship to
customers three to six months earlier than we otherwise would
have. Self-hosting was our eventual plan, but doing it early
showed us that our system was more mature than we thought
and helped us quickly identify the problems that really mat-
tered. Eat your own dog food as soon as you can.
We shipped our first test system to Patrick Mulroney at
Tandem Computers in January 1993, barely a year after Mike,
James, and I first began talking about NetApp. Patrick was a
system administrator in an engineering workgroup, and his
boss was Mike’s friend, which got us in the door. Going into
his office and seeing his setup, I realized that he was our perfect
customer. A Sun workstation sat on top of a cardboard box with
three or four disk drives scattered about and strung together
by cables. Our appliance could clean up his mess. He was a
tinkerer and a good system administrator, and he very clearly
saw the coolness of what we were doing. Earlier I said we did
less than a regular computer, but we actually developed several