Nicira, SDN and Travels

It has been seventeen days since my last blog post, which is one of the longest time periods between posts, all due to summer holiday, busy work schedule, Board meetings and family visitors.  A lot has happened in the intervening few weeks and here is my take:

Nicira was acquired. Several hundred people asked me what I thought of the deal and a subset of this group asked me why I did not blog about the deal.  I think most people know I work at Plexxi and I think most people know that Nicira and Plexxi share a common investor in Lightspeed Ventures.  My first reaction is congratulations to the Nicira team; congratulations to John Vrionis and the LightSpeed team.  I read a lot of analysis of the deal and I thought this one was interesting.

I also thought this summary of the deal significance was pretty good.  I do not know the author, but from the preciseness of the numbers I wonder if he has a Nicira presentation.  From the post “Nicira claims that its solutions save between $8.8 million and $17.6 million in reduction of server over provisioning and $8 million to $16 million in reduction of cost per port in a 40,000 server environment.”

I always viewed Nicira as a complement to what we are doing at Plexxi, but outside of their material on their web page and what I glean from common customers and industry colleagues, I have never seen a Nicira customer presentation.  I would enjoy reviewing one, but the web seems to be void of materials.  That might seem puzzling as we share an investor, but typically portfolio managers do cross pollinate information between investors.  If anyone can point me to presentation, please let me know.

SDN Stuff: Serendipity does occur.  Four weeks ago I recorded a podcast with the Packet Pushers team on whether SDN is a game changer.  I was asked to participate independent of my affiliation with Plexxi.  Here is a link to the podcast on the Packet Pushers site.  Ethan and Greg look like geniuses because we recorded this podcast on July 1.  Four weeks later in light of the Nicira acquisition there are $1.2B reasons to think that SDN might be disruptive,  Finally, a thank you from me to the Packet Pushers team for their gracious invite.

I am off for a week in SJC/SFO with numerous customer presentations and Plexxi system trials.  In the course of this coming week I know I will be seeing a number of readers and customers in the SDN ecosystem.  As of Sunday, I still have a few breakfast, coffee and beer slots open; email or DM if you want to meet.

/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. **