An employee recently asked me, "Is Data ONTAP an acronym? What does it stand for?"

Data ONTAP is sort of an acronym. You know how some acronyms are just too cute? It's clear that the goal was to make a particular word, and words were chose -- sometimes almost at random -- in order to make the acronym work. Data ONTAP is like that.

The acronym itself made no sense, so I won't even share it, but the inspiration lives on. Data ONTAP was inspired by beer. The idea was that data should flow freely, just like beer flowing from a tapped keg. Except imagine a pervasive beer infrastructure that lets you get your favorite brew from any faucet at any sink.

The reason I love the name Data ONTAP is because it captures the way people think about data. You want it to be wherever you need it, whenever you need it. On tap.

NetApp was conceived twenty years ago, on December 2^nd, 1991 at Hobee’s Restaurant in Mountain View.

It was Mike Malcolm who first thought of building a “storage appliance”, and he telephoned James Lau and me to see if we’d like to start a company with him. James was busy, so Mike and I had lunch without him. People always talk about scribbling on napkins in these sorts of discussions, but if you’ve ever used a ballpoint pen on flimsy napkin paper, you’d realize that placemats make much more sense. That’s what we wrote on. It was a long, long lunch. And afterwards, Mike and I spent another hour circling the parking lot and talking. I was pretty excited, so I called James right away, and I think he and Mike had their own lunch a day or two later.

I would say that NetApp’s birthday wasn’t until April, 1992 when we incorporated and got our first funding – fifty thousand each from three angel investors – but I’ve always thought of December 2^nd as our conception date.

EMC has been making a lot of noise about midsize business since they launched the VNXe. NetApp has been serving this market for years — in fact, we have over 10,000 midsize enterprise customers. For a while, EMC had the hot new box, because it was more recent. Now, with the FAS2240, we do. It's normal for technology competitors to go back and forth like that.

What's much more important than who refreshed their hardware more recently is that NetApp has a fundamentally different strategy than EMC, one that I believe serves customers better.

For my thoughts, watch the video. For details, visit nt-ap.com/midsizebus.

NetApp was recently named the #3 best place to work worldwide! Here are my thoughts on what that means and why it matters. If you have any stories to share, I'd love to hear them, either in the comments section below or on our Facebook page.