Dave Hitz: “Today I Am Retiring From NetApp”

In a blog published on February 14, 2019, Dave Hitz announces: “Today I am retiring from NetApp.”

He wrote: “I have been cutting back my NetApp time for the last couple of years, and especially the past few months, and I won’t suddenly disappear. (…) I think of NetApp as my child.“

As EVP, Dave Hitz and James Lau founded NetApp in 1992 to simplify storage the way Cisco simplified networking. They believed that general-purpose computing systems were too complex.

Prior to 1992, Hitz worked from 1988 to 1991as a senior engineer at Auspex Corporation, an enterprise storage solutions provider, where he was responsible for file systems and microkernel design. Formerly, he also held engineering positions at MIPS Computer, focusing on file system and I/O subsystem design for the System V kernel development effort.

Before his career in the computer industry, he worked as a cowboy, getting valuable management experience by herding, branding, and castrating cattle.