Notebook 3.9.13: NFD #5, Portfolio Changes, Daylight-ONF, OFC
Last week was busy with travel to SF and the snow storm in Boston. This week is no easier as I spend part of the week in Boston and part of it in SF with meetings in the SV.
Networking Field Day #5
Plexxi participated in Network Field Day #5 on Thursday. There were many questions from the NFD team as they were trying to digest the Plexxi system. The NFD #5 team posted the videos and if you have a couple hours they provide a base line introduction to Plexxi. Much of what I have been blogging over the past ~16 months has been about Plexxi and what we are trying to change in networking. Having been on a lot of Plexxi sales calls over the past year, I would state that everyone wants to understand the hardware and is fascinated with the optical interconnect, but the optical portion of the Plexxi system is equal to the merchant silicon portion of the system. The interesting part is Plexxi Control and how an application can orchestrate the underlying network elements (optical + switching silicon) in a Plexxi switch. Towards the end of the third video (~50 min mark) there is a comment by Derick Winkworth (Plexxi team member) about network wide view via your new CLI which is Python scripting through Plexxi Control.
Affinity Networking and Plexxi Control
Here is a post by my colleague Mike Bushong on The Insidious Cost of Incrementalism – Part 1.
Portfolio Changes
Crazy week of stock picks. I have been remiss in noting all the changes, but I am long VMW, BRCD, BSFT, Gold and AMT. I am waiting on a better entry point to buyback my GOOG position. Gold is driving me crazy as I keep it as a hedge, but all the emotion around it almost makes me want to sell it and ignore it.
Controller Wars / Daylight / ONF
I have posted frequently over the past year about controllers and SDN. I was even asked questions about Daylight at the Credit-Suisse Datacenter conference this past week. I am not sure of the accuracy of this posts, but as I wrote in September of last year it seemed that 2013 was destined to be the year of the controller wars. Dell moves to block Daylight link and analysis from SDN Central here. Speaking of SDN Central, Plexxi and Boundary will be hosting a joint demo this week on Friday.
OFC: Plexxi Demo of Optically Connected Datacenter Switches
At OFC Plexxi is going to be showing integration with an optical switch vendor. I am going to write more about this subject next week, but it goes back to Python scripting comment and orchestrating work loads across the network. Here was an interesting Twitter exchange during the NFD #5 live session:
/wrk
SIWDT 