Bengaluru, Dec 20 (IANS): NetApp, a leader in the Hybrid Cloud data services, on Thursday announced three research grants to the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT Jodhpur, Kharagpur) and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) for the advancement of research in data management space.

The company awarded fellowships to professors from IITs and IISc to further research in the areas of data management and security.

"The grants come with no strings attached and we don't claim any IP from the research, allowing for open technology propagation," said Deepak Visweswaraiah, Senior Vice President and Managing Director, NetApp.

The fellowship programme has so far granted 31 research partnerships with IP (Intellectual Property) free grants up to $20,000 over the last 10 years in the country, the company said in a statement.

For 2018, the NetApp Faculty Fellowship (NFF) was awarded to Professor Vijay Kumar of IISc Bengaluru to support research in private information retrieval and coded computation to enhance security in the age of Cloud Computing.

"The best research is done when you are working on something which has some practical relevance apart from theoretical interest. What this partnership with NetApp has allowed us to do is to bridge this gap, because by talking to companies, we get a sense of what the data industry is looking for," said Kumar.

Another fellowship went to Professor Bivas Mitra of IIT Kharagpur for research on Machine Learning (ML)-based model development for storage system trouble-shooting and workload characterisation.

Professor Subhajit Sidhanta of IIT Jodhpur has been granted the NetApp Student Fellowship (NSF) to investigate the trade-off in performance and consistency for widely distributed systems used in IoT and Fog computing.

"Through the fellowships, NetApp encourages leading-edge research in storage and data management, and seeks to foster relationships between academic researchers and our technical community," said Visweswaraiah.

The programme offers recipients opportunities to conduct research in areas like ML, IoT, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Blockchain, data lakes, data analytics and cyber security.