On board the train heading out of a cold NYC. Had a super cool day at the Oktay Technologies SDN conference. They had an A-list line up of speakers with the CEO of Arista, Martin Casado of Nicira/VMware and others. I presented yesterday’s blog post in PPT format. That is enough networking for the day.
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I am off to NYC to present at an SDN gathering hosted by Oktay Technology. I am going to change up my standard pitch deck, so I am curious to see the reaction. I have decided that I have been too nice and I plan to be more provocative and change the network dialog from speeds, feeds, ports and CLIs to a discussion about the network as a system and orchestrating the network from the applications down – opposed to the bottom up wires approach.
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It appears my supposition from 2006 will prove to be correct. There are was article in Forbes recently about Intel’s set top box (STB) initiative. I will save you from reading the article by quoting the key paragraph:
I am looking for a few networks in early 2013. I need a Hadoop/MapReduce network and a couple of networks with NAS. I have a lead on a ~400 server Hadoop cluster and we are already doing testing with one of the leading cloud storage vendors, but if you have production or semi-production network, probably configured in traditional leaf/spine layout, and you would like to see a Plexxi network in action, contact me. Continue reading
I am an admirer of John Kennedy and I think he was a wonderful speaker, especially with gifted writers such as Ted Sorensen. Kennedy’s administration changed social culture in America. It ended the era of 
the fedora. The White House went from functionary to glamorous. America transitioned from the antiseptic 50s to the dynamic 60s. The country embraced big aspirations, from the moon to human rights. I included a picture of JFK stopping by a news stand from 1957. It was taken by the father of a family friend, six years before his famous speech in Berlin. I saw the picture again a few weeks ago at a show for the photographer in Boston and it made me wonder how many people were Berliners in 1957.
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The last few months have been a blistering pace at Plexxi and it has impacted my time to write. Writing is important to me as it is my method of thinking in depth without the interruptions of email, calls, text and tweets. Outside my window a Biblical rain is falling and I have Zac Brown playing. As with past notebook entries, here is collection of topics I have been reading and thinking about over the past few weeks.
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I was not planning to blog this week as I have plenty of other content to produce, but sometimes the urge to blog is difficult to ignore. Here are some links to posts I have been reading over the weekend and today:
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I had dinner in NYC with an old acquaintance from my stint on the buy side. During dinner I was asked what I like long and short. Admittedly, I have been in more cash, HY credit and some gold for the past six months and I have not really thought about equities. There I was almost half way through my second Manhattan at Keens (wow, what a bar at that place) in midtown talking stocks. It was pretty fun to just rattle off tickers and sectors. It seems like a long time since I just talked stocks and positions. In rapid fire, here is a summary of some longs, shorts and thoughts.
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Plexxi will be hosting an invite only event in NYC on the 27th. This is a small event, bringing together people to discuss how Plexxi’s Affinity Networking is using SDN to actually do something for Enterprise and Cloud Data Centers. We should fill up quickly, but if you are an end-user and would like an invite email me at plexxi.com or DM @wr_koss.
/wrk
I received a few comments and several emails from my last post, which was a surprise. It seems I am always surprised as to which posts receive responses and it is not something I am good at predicitng. My last post was just a quick post written somewhere over the middle part of the country on a VA flight from LAX. I actually posted it to my blog using MarsEdit while drinking a scotch and glancing at the TV. For all the complaining I do about traveling, contemporary travel is far better than my early career years when I had a choice of a smoking seat. Here is one of the comments from my last post that got me thinking: Continue reading
Another week in a startup, means another week on the road. I was in BOS, NYC, SFO and Palo Alto this week for a mix of customer meetings, conferences and networking. I enjoy spending time in PA because I always get a good mix of topical conversation with VCs, entrepreneurs, colleagues, customers and others. Here are some things I overheard that made me think:
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I have been on the road making sales calls for Plexxi. I am still amazed at the effort being put into the discovery of SDN use cases. I was going to tweet the other day that I had found the perfect use case for SDN “fixing the network,” but self-restraint won the day. There is a lot of FUD in the system presently and it leads to statements such as ”the most common use cases for SDN will be in network monitoring and provisioning as an added value.” If that is SDN, I am going home. Luckily, I have done 60+ sales calls selling solutions that encompass elements of SDN and I can say with 100% accuracy that no potential customer has ever taken a few hours out of their day to talk to me about network monitoring and provisioning. Maybe network monitoring and provisioning are a compelling use case for SDN, I am just stating that I cannot secure a time commitment from a potential client to talk about that subject matter. I am not critical of people thinking that SDN is about network monitoring, because I know if enough people say that is what SDN is and they keep repeating it, many people will just assume that is what SDN is. The SDN Central site lists a number of SDN use cases, but these are high level, thematic type applications and I have found that starting a customer presentation at this level triggers a Gong Show moment. What customers do take time out of their day to talk about is fixing their network.
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Between my first blog (Tech & GeoPolitics) in 2006-2007 and SIWDT, I have written on and off about social networking. I am by no means a social networking expert, but I have been using email since 1990 so I am experienced in communicating with people in electronic form. I have also been Facebook free since February 2011. I tweet a few times a week and I have a profile on Linkedin. I have written various things about social networking in the past and most of it was speculative and humorous in nature.
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It has been awhile since I have had time to think about stocks and since we are at the start of earrings today, I was looking through my stock watch list and thought I would pick out a few interesting charts.
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If I told you that HPQ had 349,000 employees at last report would you be surprised? I did not attend HP’s analyst day this past week, but I did read a few of the headlines with surprise. Here are few that I thought were noteworthy:
On CNBC the day after:
I have written a few times on my blog about HPQ. The last entry of note was over a year ago in September 2011 here. At the time I wrote “This is an interesting chart when you consider that it is framed by $25B for Compaq in September 2001 and the iPad shipping in January 2010. Assume for moment that the credit crisis did not happen and the chart is down a bit in 2008 and then peaked in 2010. HPQ acquired EDS in 2008. They did this because they were believing in the ongoing propagation of Moore’s Law and the enterprises would consume more network infrastructure and having the ability to influence or control the decision making process in regard to that consumption was a good position. Kind of interesting that the peak in HPQ equity coincided with launch of the iPad, which marks an important transition point for the PC market in the same manner that the iPhone marked a transition point for the mobile device market.”
In November 2011, I wrote the following on HPQ “Meg Whitman, CEO of HPQ on CNBC: I think companies should give Y/Y guidance only and report a monthly set of numbers, which would be a subset of financials and unaudited. I think this would take a lot of emotion out of quarterly results as well as the channel check drama. With that said when companies stop giving guidance or provide less transparency, I do not see how this is helpful and I sell or short the stock until I can trust the management team. I listened to Meg Whitman’s comments on CNBC yesterday. She said there was a lot of complexity and cost in HPQ and she wants to strip it away and simplify the company (my take away from her talking points). Leo was there 9 months, so did all this cost and complexity come from him or did Hurd oversee it? I viewed Hurd was an acquisitive cost cutter and when he was ousted the management team at HPQ was quick to tell investors that Hurd and stripped the company down to the bare bones and there was no investment in innovation and growth. Apparently I am confused.”
Here is updated version of a weekly chart for HPQ going back to the time of the Compaq acquisition. A year later and HPQ is going full on RIMM. I have a colleague at work that has a thesis I have heard him 
tell many times. His meme is about the large tech companies (e.g. IBM, HPQ, DELL, and OCRL) have been on a binge to become diversified IT companies. If you look at the history of tech acquisitions post the LEH bankruptcy it supports his meme. We joke about every Board Room having a white board full of categories on the Y axis and the big players on the X axis. Management teams are focused on filling in every box: IT services, cloud, storage, networking, tablets, mobile, big data, little data, dumb data, etc.
In terms of HPQ, I think it is good that the CEO is comfortable with the BOD because that has been one BOD full of drama since the Compaq deal. I am not sure investors could take another decade of drama, pre-texting, spying, tattle telling, etc. I am not sure if the CEO thinks the company is too big, too small or just the correct size. I suspect that the leadership team and BOD are all trying to determine what size is correct as well. What I do know is the PC market has turned against the company, printing has gone with it and the EDS business is not a grower. The rest of the business is a just a bunch of parts and they may be 1 or 2 in each market, but they are not great markets. As for being a diversified IT company, whatever happened to the diversified IT companies of the 1970s and 1980s? You know…IBM, EDS, NCR, ATT, Amdahl, CA, Tandem, Wang, DEC and DG. I am not sure being a diversified IT company is a good thing, but as usual I could be wrong.
[Note...it is Monday morning and I already see the break-up, sell off, sum of the parts notes coming out of Wall Street. I would not be buyer on any sum of the parts, break up value or IP value notes.]
/wrk
* It is all about the network stupid, because it is all about compute. *
** Comments are always welcome in the comments section or in private. **
In his book Confederates in the Attic, Tony Horwitz writes about a group of reenactors who strive to experience a period rush. I think there is a fair amount of truth in his description, but I would define it differently. I define a period rush as: when all elements become aligned and the reenactor becomes immersed in the period and for a fleeting moment, touches the distant past. There is great deal of truth to the period rush. They do happen, but they are rare. The following is from a reenactment of the Battle of McDowell that occurred in 1862, but the reenactment took place in 2001.
The last three days were very tough; two nights sleeping on the ground in the open with several miles of marching and combat on Saturday and Sunday. We arrived in McDowell on Friday and made our camp for the night. On Saturday, I stupidly volunteered for duty with Provost Guard. There was really no choice in the matter because one from our company was going. I spent day listening to the citizens of McDowell complain about stolen chickens, ruined property and various other transgressions of their lives by Yankee soldiers.
Of all the moments I had at McDowell, the best was not a period rush, but one that exists just between the folds of 1862 and the 2001. After the common meal on Saturday, we had a little time to ourselves before forming for our march up the mountain. I took my cup of tea over by the church and sat down by the rail fence facing the road. As I sat there, a neatly dressed man in his 60s wandered up to the edge of the fence and was photographing the soldiers sharing a meal together in the churchyard. He spied me from about forty feet away and slowly walked toward me. When he got close, he shyly asked “Kin ah take yoa pichure?” I said of course he could. He took the photo and said thank you.
He started to step away, then turned and asked, “are you a friend of Christ?” Sort of surprised, I said yes. He then said “Guess that makes us brothers then.” I replied it does. After a moment he said quietly, motioning to the gathered soldiers, “I guess a lot of those boys who fought here back in the war were our brothers too.” I knew he could see it. I stood up and introduced myself, as did he. He went on to tell me how he had lost his wife three years earlier. Every Sunday they would drive the fifteen miles into McDowell to attend the Presbyterian Church. They never missed a Sunday. We talked for awhile and he counseled me that home and family were the most important things in life.
We ended the conversation with a nod and he walked slowly back to his Lincoln parked down the road and drove away. The old man was able to make the connection of common elements, faith in his case, between us and the boys of 186 and felt comfortable enough to express that to a total stranger. His eyes had been opened to something that had never struck him before.
Late Saturday afternoon orders came down that we were to march into the foothills of Allegheny Mountains and take up positions for the night. We marched out of town and soon were lost in the fields in the foothills without a single modern intrusion. Men marched in heavy marching order (packs and bedrolls for those of you who forget your history). When we took a rest during the march, I turned to look back at the column of blue stopped on the road. There was a long row of stacked arms as the troops rested on the sides of the road. Smoke drifted up from the occasional cigar and pipe. We took the usual insults of “go home you dirty Yankees” from people passing by as we left town. Now that the area around McDowell had been fully occupied by the Federal Army, the local residents did not take kindly to the intrusion today and yesterday. Some things never change.
When we arrived at our camp for the night, we immediately put our attention to finding a place to sleep as it looked like it was going to rain. Soon a dark, drenching thunderstorm was passing overhead reminding us that the men of the 19th century stood out in the rain more often than not. In typical military fashion just when we had decided on our shelter spot, orders came down that we may be breaking camp and moving to the top of a big hill. It was almost dark and the hill was about a mile away. Our leaders were concerned about reports that a Rebel column was expected to come over the hill that evening or next morning. I personally was not looking forward to marching up the hill in the rain only to be attacked by Stonewall Jackson sometime in the darkness. We put our gear back on, stood around for awhile and then the damn officers finally made a decision to move our company down the road where there was another path to the top of the hill that the Rebels were supposedly coming over. We camped on the side of the road and just as we finished building a shelter along a stacked rail fence – the rain stopped.
We slept out in the open that night along side a flowing stream. No cooking fires were allowed as the officers we concerned we might be too close to the Rebel column that was coming over the hill. Most men were too tired to eat and wrapped themselves in their gum blankets and fell asleep. We had to put pickets out all night, but not me as I had been on Provost Guard duty during the day. We rose well before the dawn and quickly assembled into heavy marching order as we expected a Confederate attack at dawn. I was pleased to see the pickets on duty in the distance. Once assembled our group was placed up the road on picket duty. We watched the Yankee army march from where we spent the night to the first campsite that we occupied for 15 minutes the night before. Once by us, they stopped down the road and lit cooking fires for breakfast. It is a rare sight to see men dressed in 19th century clothing break ranks and forage wood for fires. Soon whiffs of smoke were drifting in the breeze and the smell of bacon and coffee enlivened the morning air. Our company was on picket duty and we were pushed further away from the main body. Four of us were placed high on a hillside near a great tree, which I figured was old enough to have seen the war.
We had a commanding view of the valley and the opposing hillside. The land was mainly pasture with the occasional cattle gazing about and clumps of woods here and there. If this was really 1982, those would be dead cattle. It was cold enough in the morning that we decided to put on our great coats. This is when the first period rush occurred. My pards were eating a cold breakfast when I said to them “the breeze almost makes it cold enough for great coats.” My friend replied “I know its cold enough for great coats.” We then unrolled our great coats from our packs. In nearly ten years of reenacting, I have never put my great coat on in the field – only at night or in the morning around camp. To have our packs against the tree, seated with our great coats on in a stiff breeze with a commanding view was special. Not a single contemporary intrusion marred our senses. After about two hours and countless jokes about how the Rebels were “not coming this day” I thought I heard the command “halt” given in the distance. The wind was in our face and it carried sounds quite well – but nothing revealed itself to the eye.
Below me on the road between the hills, I could see the men of our force snoozing and eating breakfast. Suddenly, high on the opposing hill side I spotted a solitary figure. This then became two companies of Rebels in skirmish line moving down the hill at a deliberate pace. A single horseman moved back and forth across the ridge as the skirmishers moved down the hill towards our position. After the skirmishers had progressed a few hundred yards down the hill, two columns of Rebels came over the hill moving quite quickly. It was an awe inspiring sight. We sat and watched the spectacle for some time. It was an absolutely precious moment. The Rebel commander brought his troops down the hill in fantastic order.
Within an hour of first sighting of the enemy, the skirmishers were engaged. When the main rebel column assembled on the road they had to dispatch a company of men to deal with us as we were shooting at them. I must state at this time we waited too long before we moved away from our position and when a full battalion is on the road, a single infantry company cannot hold them back. There is power behind a mass column of infantry. Napoleon knew this. Thus our company was easily swept down the road and four of us were captured.
We learned the Rebels had been on the march since 4:30am and thus their commander was pacing the army with frequent rest stops. Men were really falling out from fatigue. The four of us where then paroled and told to pass between the lines. When we reached the Yankee line (about a mile away) there was a lead company holding the line while the rest of the troops rested in the fields that we had passed the day before. We reported to the Yankee commander by order of the Adjutant giving him all the intelligence we could and we also learned that our names had been entered into the official dispatch of our Company Commander for our bravery and sacrifice. Since we were paroled, we were told to take a bunch of Rebel prisoners back to McDowell at the bayonet so the reserve company could join the battle line.
When we caught up to the group of prisoners, their dumb sergeant claimed that they were not prisoners, but really “malingers, miscreants and invalids.” In fact, he called them an Invalid Company who had spent the night in a barn unable to march with the rebel column. Thus ended our weekend marauding the village of McDowell in the Rebel south.
/wrk
Yesterday HP announced some SDN products to include a controller. If you had read my SDN Working Thoughts #3 post, then you already knew this data point. I have many questions about this announcement, starting with why would they announce an OpenFlow based controller when you can get one from Big Switch Networks (BSN)? I am sure there is a smart answer, but that is not my point. In addition to HPQ, IBM announced a controller using the NEC controller. My point is there is has been and continues to be a lot of development and design of controllers going on. My hypothesis is that the controller architecture will play a role as to where the battle of SDN market share will be won and lost in the coming years and simplification of the market into “separating the data plane from the control plane” is not specific enough and does not encompass a broad enough data set. I have written several times before SDN is more than APIs and reinventing the past thirty years of networking in OpenFlowease.
I think a person’s perspective of the controller is directly related to how you see the network evolving and how your company wants to run their business. There is no stand alone controller market. If I was to summarize the various views of the controller I would say that incumbent vendors view a third party controller as a threat and need to provide a controller as hedge in their portfolio in case it becomes a strategic point of emphasis. Incumbents really do not know what to do with a controller in terms of their legacy business, which is why they market a controller as some sort of auto-provisioning, stat collecting NMS on steroids. It will enable you to buy more of their legacy stuff, which for HPQ after today’s guidance cut may not be the case. The emerging SDN companies view the controller as point of contention for network control. All the companies in the market share labeled “other” or “non-Cisco” view the controller as a means to access the locked-in market share of Cisco. In the past, I would have told you that control planes have enormous monetary value if you can commercialize them inside customers. Cisco did this with IGRP, IOS, Cisco IOS and NX-OS. Ciena did this with the CoreDirector. Sonus failed to do this. Ipsilon failed to do this. Does anyone remember the 56k modem standard battle between US Robotics and the rest of the world who were working on the 56k standard and who won that market battle? The question becomes over the next year or two is how many controllers become commercialized in the market place and what are these controllers doing? I think there is a difference between controllers doing network services and controllers providing network orchestration based on application needs.
The following quote is from Jim Duffy’s article in Network World on HP’s controller announcement:
“HP’s Virtual Application Networks SDN Controller is an x86-based appliance or software that runs on an x86-based server. It supports OpenFlow, and is designed to create a centralized view of the network and automate network configuration of devices by eliminating thousands of manual CLI entries. It also provides APIs to third-party developers to integrate custom enterprise applications. The controller can govern OpenFlow-enabled switches like the nine 3800 series rolled out this week, and the 16 unveiled earlier this year. Its southbound interface relays configuration instructions to switches with OpenFlow agents, while it’s northbound representational state transfer interfaces — developed by HP as the industry mulls standardization of these interfaces — relays state information back to the controller and up to the SDN orchestration systems.”
Reading Duffy’s description I think the SDN orchestration system (is that application orchestration?) is more valuable than the controller he describes, but that is a side discussion. I also took the time to read this blog post from HP. Much of this controller architecture discussion has been on my mind for months as well as in my day to day work conversations for the past few months. It seems a day cannot go by without a conversation on this matter. I have no conclusions to offer in this post, so if you are looking for one please stop reading. The point of this post is that controller architecture, controller design and how SDN will evolve is in process and I think it is little early to be declaring the availability of solutions that offer marginal incremental value at best. The evolution of the controller thought process can be summarized at a high level by the following:
From the Martin’s blog in the section on General SDN Controllers:
“The platform we’ve been working on over the last couple of years (Onix) is of this latter category. It supports controller clustering (distribution), multiple controller/switch protocols (including OpenFlow) and provides a number of API design concessions to allow it to scale to very large deployments (tens or hundreds of thousands of ports under control). Since Onix is the controller we’re most familiar with, we’ll focus on it. So, what does the Onix API look like? It’s extremely simple. In brief, it presents the network to applications as an eventually consistent graph that is shared among the nodes in the controller cluster. In addition, it provides applications with distributed coordination primitives for coordinating nodes’ access to that graph.”
Regarding, ONIX here’s a brief summary of the architecture but you can read a paper on it here and note who the author’s are and where they work:
Combining the info from multiple sources, Google uses ONIX for a network OS (see the link to the ONIX paper above). ONIX appears to be Nicira’s closed source version of NOX, and both Nicira and Google use it. NEC has something called Helios that involves OpenFlow, which noted above was OEMed by IBM. I not sure about HPQ and their recent controller announcement, but I think it serves us well to understand the history of the ONIX architecture.
Is ONIX a direction for some OpenFlow evolution or a design point? I think one of the early visions for OpenFlow and ONIX was for it to become a cloud OS, which it has yet to become, but others are trying. The evolution of OF/ONIX vision looks something like this:
It will be interesting over the next year or so to see how the architecture of the controller evolves. I wrote about some of this in the SDN Working Thoughts #3 post. I think we are coming to an understanding that there are variations to just running a controller in band with the data flows. I think we will conclude that having a controller act as session border control device translating between the legacy protocol world and the OpenFlow world is also a non-starter, but this is the current hedge strategy of most incumbent vendors. As the world of SDN evolves, we will look back and see the path to what SDN has become by looking at the failures as proofs along the way. The industry will solve the scaling and large state questions, but I think the solutions will be shown to exist closer to the hardware (i.e. network) than most envision in the pure software only view.
In a prior post I had made a reference to an article that was partially inspired by a post by Pascale Vicat-Blanc on the Lyattis blog. The Lyatiss team has been working on a cloud language for virtual infrastructure modeling. In particular, it generalizes the Flowvisor concept of virtualizing the physical network infrastructure to include application concepts. I am not sure of the extent of their orchestration goals. Do they expect Cloudweaver to spin up the VMs and storage, place them on specific servers, configure the network to satisfy specific traffic engineering constraints, and finally tear down the VMs? I am not sure. With Nicira now part of VMWare what is the future for NOX/ONIX and will other companies be innovators or implementors?
There is another potential market evolution to consider when we think about the controller. The silicon developers are looking to develop chips that disaggregate servers into individual components. The objective is to make the components of the server, especially the CPU upgradable. Some people have envisioned this type of compute cluster to be controlled by OpenFlow, but I think that is unlikely. Network protocols will be around for a very long time, but putting that aside, the question is what does this type of compute clustering do for the network? How much server to server traffic stays in the rack / cluster / pod / DC? I am not sure how much of this evolution will have to do with OpenFlow, but what I do know is that this type of compute evolution will have a lot to do with SDN, if you believe that SDN is about defining network topologies based the needs of the applications that use the network.
In a true representation of the title, this post is just some working thoughts on SDN with hypotheses to be proven. Comments and insights welcome…
/wrk
An odd week of news and notes. Truth be told, there is not a lot that I am really motivated to write about, but there were a number of noteworthy articles and videos during the week. Here is my run down of things I read or watched during the week:
1. About mid week I started to see all these hits on my blog from Networkworld. Jim Duffy had listed my blog on a list of useful Cisco blogs. Kind of cool and thanks to Jim. With that maybe I should write something about Cisco.
2. Here is a link to an interview that John Chambers did with Reuters. At the ~4 min mark he talks about market and technology (~7 min mark) transitions, the next big thing, etc. I really have to wonder what transitions they have organically caught over the years? The Flip phone? No. Cable business? No, they bought that in the form of SA. I think Cisco is a sales machine, but they bought Crescendo and rolled up the switching market in mid-1990s. They bought Webex, they bought SA, bought a bunch of optical companies that were a disaster. They buy a lot of companies, they are not innovators and they do not catch market transitions. They buy technology and market transitions. There is nothing wrong with that, but the company is not visionary in nature. They wait till customers tell them to buy into a market in the form of a company. As for what customers think of Cisco, this article is on a general level representative of what I hear in the market.
3. Yesterday I read this article on SDN. Speaking of Cisco, it is full of quotes from Cisco:
The operative word in the term software defined network isn’t software. It’s defined, said David Yen, senior vice president and general manager for Cisco’s data center group. He said networks need to be defined by the applications that are using them. ”It’s a change in perspective,” Yen said. ‘It’s really an evolution of this art of networking intelligence. And furthermore, a lot of the SDN idea is actually blending in some of the functions and features that traditional data center management software is doing. People are turning their attention more and more to the application perspective,” Yen said. “For the ease of developing applications and for the ease and effectiveness of deploying applications, it’s the right time for the underlying infrastructure to serve whatever the application desires.”
From Plexxi’s perspective, it is really great to read senior leaders at the marquee name in the industry adopting our view. We agree that networks need to be defined by the applications that use them, rather than those pesky distributed protocols trying to figure out state and we certainly think that the underlying network infrastructure should be reflective of the application requirements.
4. Sounds like a tough week for the Juniper QFabric team if this article is correct.
5. Did I mention that Plexxi was listed as a hot startup by the WSJ? Yea…#12.
Wrapping up what I wrote: Cisco does not get market transitions, they buy them. Cisco SVP of Data centers thinks SDN is about applications. Juniper QFabric team downsized. Plexxi next big thing and we think that applications matter, and the NFL finally fixed the mess and Goodell should not be back or I should get a refund for 3/16ths of my season tickets value.
/wrk
As with my first post about Antietam and the Vacant Chair, I have started to weave some creative writing into my technology and business focused blog. If it is not for you, please disregard. I am writing this post from the reading room in the Norman Williams library in Woodstock Vermont, which was built in 1883. Outside the leaves are in full color and on the town green is chile cook off contest. More than a decade ago, I started writing a book on my experiences reenacting the American Civil War. I was motivated to write it because I had read Confederates in the Attic. I knew some of those people in that book and had been at the same places. Writing a book requires time and concentration. Over the years I have found that I am productive in writing short stories, hence the blog. As I dig stuff out of my unfinished draft called Echoes from Our Past, I am going to post them here. Maybe someday they will grow into longer manuscript.
It is June 17, 2001 and I am traveling from my home in Boston to San Francisco for business. I travel frequently for business; sometimes making more then 150 flights a year. The travel can be tedious, but the time on the airplane affords me a chance to write and contemplate. Much of the time I have had to write was found on airplanes. I have had many of my best creative thoughts while gazing out over the horizon and watching America roll by beneath me. I am presently over the Rocky Mountains. The last wisps of snow dot the high recesses of the peaks. Puffy clouds float below me as if they were dabs of cotton caught in the wind.
It is just past Memorial Day and I am reading a June copy of U.S. News and World Report. There is a small article of towards to the middle of the magazine. It is so small that it is easily missed. The article and chart discuss the cost of our nation’s wars. A small picture accompanies the article. I am drawn to this picture. As I examine the picture, I realize that it is a picture of a Confederate soldier. At first, I thought it was a mistake. I dismiss the picture to an error in editing. Someone decided that the article on the cost of our nation’s wars should include a picture of a soldier. I concluded that the person assembling the article was ignorant of their history and had simply chosen a random file photo of a soldier. The fact that the soldier was from a war that ended one hundred and thirty-six years ago did not occur to this person. Historical and factual accuracy have never stopped the media from filling their pages – why should it now?
After examining the picture and noting the uniform as any reenactor would, I take the time to read the chart. The first line on the chart states that the government of the United States of America is paying benefits to thirteen dependents from the American Civil War. I am paralyzed in my seat. How could this be? This is a mistake. It is not possible. It is 2001. A new millennium has dawned for our great country. Over the past few months, our national media has been filled with stories about the passing of the Second World War generation. Some 13,000 of these great men and women are passing away each day. Our government has just decided to spend millions creating a monument to their deeds in Washington. The government has even stated that they are going to fast track the construction with the hope of having it completed before we lose many more of the generation. A great and powerful UNITED States of America that put a man on the moon in 1969, some thirty-two years ago – has still have not finished paying the dependents from those who fought in the American Civil War, a war that occurred in the 1860s – not the 1960s.
This is why the Civil War lives in our national consciousness. We cannot escape the occasional reference to it. When my father was born in 1931, there were still veterans from the Civil War alive. To think that my father could have spoken with a man who served with Lee or Hancock or Grant or Longstreet personalizes the Civil War. The Civil War is not destined to the pages of history, it closer then I ever thought. These connections to our past enable the past to come alive for us. I was born well after the last Civil War veteran passed away, but father was not. I live in a new millennium, in an America that the veterans of the Civil War could hardly imagine; yet, the last fleeting dependents from that generation are writing their final words on their shaping of America. Their book is not yet complete and as they draw their final words on our country’s pages, I wonder where they are. Are they in homes or hospitals? Do people visit them or care for then? Has someone taken the time to record his or her story? I hope that they are comfortable and know that someone cares. This is why the Civil War is important – because somewhere outside my 757 is living connection to that time and I care, only wishing I could know their secrets.
/wrk
I was in CA earlier in the week to attend the JP Morgan SDN conference in Palo Alto. To start I would like to thank Rod and the JPM team for the invite. A number of companies presented (Arista, Cisco, HP, Vyatta, Big Switch, Ciena, Embrane, Vello, Cumulus, Cyan and Brocade) and there were a number of startups in the audience: Insieme, Plumgrid and Plexxi. Rather than a reprint of my conference notes, I thought it might be more useful to describe what I thought were interesting discussion points, debates and themes to emerge from my perspective as an observer. I paraphrased the comments from various speakers. My observations below are not exact quotes, but rather thematic summaries of discussions.
Attendance: Most of the startups or young companies sent their CEOs to speak. This includes Arista, Vyatta, Big Switch, Embrane and Cumulus. Juniper was not present. Cisco sent a Sr. Director level person while Brocade and HPQ sent CTO types. I am not sure if there is anything to read into that, but I noted who was participating.
Openflow: There was a lot discussion around the next version of OpenFlow. Dan Pitt (Executive Director of the ONF) and Guru Parulkar (Executive Director, Consulting Professor at Stanford) both spoke on the direction of OpenFlow and the ONF community.
Controller Market Share: Just listening throughout the day I got the sense that Big Switch (BSN), HPQ, CSCO and JNPR (recent press article confirmed by a friend) are all building controllers. I am not sure if everyone’s controller is based on OpenFlow, but Google also built a controller which I am sure it is for internal use and I know they contribute to the OpenFlow working group. I listened to Guido Appenzeller, CEO of BSN, speak and he made some interesting points about controllers. He contrasted BSN with Nicira by saying that Nicira was overlay tunnels for VMs/HyperV, while BSN was focused on three elements of SDN: (i) hardware (HW) switches, (ii) open source Controller which is FloodLight (iii) and apps. He commented that Floodlight was ahead of all controllers and the market (i.e. end-users) is going to want a open source controller and will not be locked into a single controller from a single vendor. The BSN controller is being architected for service providers and enterprises and he believes the SDN market will evolve along the lines of Linux. BSN is not a hardware company, so they are not focused on switches. BSN is focused on the controller for the good of the community and plan to build their business around the applications using SDN. They want to be the App Store of SDN networks. He commented that the first phase of SDN is overlays on the existing brown field networks, but soon there will be a new hardware/switch layer that enables the second phase of the SDN evolution. In a later panel, Jayshree of Arista commented that there might be application specific overlay controllers.
App Stores for Controllers: When I hear people describe this view of SDN it always involves applications like load balancers, firewalls and routing. I think of these things as network services and I do not think that network services belong in App Stores and I am not convinced they have anything to do with SDN.
When Does SDN Matter: Everyone agreed that SDN is starting now, it will accelerate and reach critical mass in three years which is the start of the sustained period of adoption and growth years. Dave Stevens, Brocade’s CTO commented that SDN does not reduce the power of incumbency and that the big stacked networks that have been built over the past twenty years are complex and really hard to switch out. I would comment that this is exactly the problem statement for SDN. He commented that SDN is about automation and that many of their customers are asking what does SDN mean to them. Brocade’s plan is to partner for SDN.
VXLAN: There was lots of chatter on VXLAN. I understand it, I just do not get the excitement. Wrapping something in more of something is not really innovation. If you get excited about VXLAN, you probably think fondly of the following terms: Multi-bus, IGRP, AGS, RIP2 and you have not missed a standards body meeting in a few decades.
SDN in WAN: There were three transport focused companies at the conference: CIEN, Cyan and Vello. Ever since the Google OpenFlow WAN presentation at2012 ONS, there has been a lot of interest in how SDN fits in the WAN. The VP of Engineering for Vello commented that transport is complex, resources (i.e. fiber?) are scarce and cited the Google OF WAN. They are focused on DC to DC interconnects. The CTO of Ciena (an old colleague from my CIEN days) commented that the problem SPs have is how to get a lot of capacity to many locations cheaply. He describes this decade as the M2M decade coming off the mobility and internet booms from the prior decades. He also made some other comments that I would agree with: (i) if SPs can separate compute of topology from path calculation that could become very powerful for carriers and (ii) the SDN proposition for the carrier is the ability to have levers that change the underlying wires of the network more than once every 3-7 years. Imagine if they could change them many times a day! That last sentence was a veiled Plexxi comment by me.
SDN for High Capacity Infrastructure: One of the speakers I was most impressed with was J.R. Rivers of Cumulus Networks. I had never heard him speak before. He was part of a SDN panel with three other companies, but had time to make some interesting comments. He said that Cumulus was focused on high capacity infrastructure. He talked about building DCs in which servers were made up of communities of systems and the relationship of how these communities peer with other communities in the DC. He cited a example of how a community of ten servers might work together and that there are many apps in a DC and that clusters of machines want to work with other apps in different clusters. He thinks SDN is a way to deploy apps in the DC and that enterprises are in the proof of concept phase for SDN. He commented the SDN might be the SLA for the application in the enterprise. He does not think that SDN obsoletes hardware, but rather SDN allows the network to run different parts of software on different end points. SDN is not path computation, it is connectivity and SDN enables virtual and physical machines to communicate and in totality this becomes an enabler for SLAs to move into the overall network system.
Panel on Switching and Networking: There was interesting fireside chat with Arista, BSN, Brocade and HPQ towards the end of the ay. Jayshree of Arista views SDN as a seminal moment in networking where the orchestration of the network is improved and this translates into OPEX savings. Guido commented that controller architectures will evolve and we will see an evolution of the first generation centralized controllers to a distributed controller model. There might be one logical controller and a distributed set of computational controllers like a hadoop cluster. There was a discussion about the development of controllers of controllers and application specific controllers for overlay functions. At the end of the discussion of controllers, there was a discussion that there was no good solution for the controller of controllers and that this was probably a good PhD thesis to be written. There was unanimous agreement that the VSwitch is a strategic point in the network. With all the SDN talk, HPQ pointed out that not everything is about SDN and managing the legacy network is just as important and customers want a single pane of glass to manage the network.
Cisco Systems Meme: Throughout the conference there were discussions on the future for Cisco and what will be the affect of SDN on Cisco; this is kind of what happens when you run around the world with a presentation entitled “Cisco and the Seven Dwarfs” from eight years go. This has not been a topic I have been shy about, but there was a neatly packaged thesis that made sense to me from several of the CEOs of SDN startups who were former Cisco executives. The thesis is that Cisco has grown up to be IBM. They develop their own ASICs, they package their ASICs/Hardware with their closed software and sell it as a system at very high margin. Think IBM mainframe. The only way to beat Cisco is to be cheaper, better and faster. This was clearly the strategy of Arista. Along comes SDN and it is going to unleash the value that is contained in the closed system. I once wrote a book on what happens when you deregulate a market called telecom and clearly many of the SDN startups are looking to deregulate Cisco’s market share. The companies that are building SDN solutions see Cisco as the IBM of the 1980s and they want to unlock the value in the closed system. In one way this makes sense to me as I started my technology career selling multi-protocol bridges and routers into SNA networks. I was told as a young sales person that no one gets fired for buying IBM and to beat IBM you need to be cheaper, better and faster. I know today that no one gets fired for buying Cisco. This was reinforced just yesterday when I got an email from a CEO of Cloud Provider who told me he was not interested in any alternatives to Cisco because they are a Cisco shop and Cisco now has SDN. The caveat with this story making sense to me is I might be falling victim to the power of stories and legends. :-(
/wrk
