(This was originally posted on GigaOm on May 6, 2012)
Earlier this month I spent a few days at the Open Networking Summit in Santa Clara, Calif. and walked away certain I watched history being made in the networking industry. The emergence of the OpenFlow standard and software defined networking have been on my radar for a while, but at this event, the future coalesced.
(This was originally posted on GigaOm on Feb 22, 2012)
Last week, IBM made a significant announcement that received relatively little attention. The IBM System Networking Distributed Virtual Switch 5000V is the first third party virtual switching platform for VMware environments. Of course, Cisco has the Nexus 1000v, but given the long history, investment, and VCE joint venture, it doesn’t really count as an independent third party in my book. Continue reading
I will be out in the Bay Area this week for a number of meetings and to speak on a panel at the Server Design Summit in Santa Clara. I am on the Venture Capital panel on Wednesday afternoon at 2pm with a few other great investors including, Chris Rust from US Venture Partners, John Vrionis from Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Rohini Chakravarty from NEA.
The conference has an impressive line-up of speakers if you are interested in data center / server design, Flash memory, and how cloud infrastructures are really being built today. Our portfolio company Calxeda, who is leading the ARM server revolution will also have a strong presence with Karl Freund appearing on two panels (one Tues and Wed). Best of all, many of the sessions and the exhibits are open to the public! Email me alex@battery.com or tweet at me (@abenik) if you’d like to meet up – hope to see you there.
- Alex
Authors Note: I wrote 95% of this post just after VmWorld and just prior to the announcement of NVGRE. I was too lazy to go back and add something on this new proposed standard but as a different scheme for tunneling layer 2 over layer 3, it plays directly into the theme of this piece.
In the welcome post for The Whole Stack I wrote a bit about layering and abstractions. To that end, VXLAN was introduced with great fan fair at VmWorld. This announcement made me realize how similarly the data center network is evolving, as compared to what we have already seen in carrier IP backbones, specifically with Pseudo Wires and VPLS.
As someone who got into technology via networking, the venerable OSI model is often my guide. Of course this is a just a reference model and not a strict guide or a reflection of actual practice. The idea of “this over that networking,” and “almost anything over IP,” are marketing and technical truisms. Continue reading
(This post originally appeared on peHUb’s blogger network).
Steve Jobs is gone. The media will be talking for days and weeks about the premature loss of a one-of-a-kind genius, one who had a magic-like insight into what people wanted even before they themselves knew it, to spur passion into dull pieces of electronics, to redefine fashion and style.
For us here at Battery, Steve Jobs and Apple, meant a lot to us individually when we were teenagers and young adults growing up in the ‘80s… Continue reading
IBM is a smart company. In fact, a recent Economist feature on IBM’s Centenary, which
IBM in the 1950s
looked at today’s celebrated tech giants and speculated which of them will be around in 100 years — claims that IBM is a front runner. The article alleges that a company’s longevity depends upon its ability to define itself in a time-resistant manner. I couldn’t agree more. A sad case in point is Kodak, which is now considering going bankrupt. It failed the test of time because it didn’t define itself as ‘the company that helps people save memories’ or even as ‘the company that helps people take photos’. It defined itself as the company making photographic film, and when film died, it took Kodak with it. Continue reading
The idea for MTPC came to me upon reflecting on what I had heard at the Velocity conference this year. For a variety of reasons, this article sat 90% completed in my queue for a number of months. I finally got around to getting it done and though slightly less timely, the premise is no less relevant. Special thanks to Jesse Robbins (Opscode), Adrian Cockcroft (Netflix), John Rauser (Amazon), and John Allspaw and Kellan Elliott-McCrea (Etsy), who knowingly or unknowingly, provided inspiration, support, and of course graphics. Continue reading
