The project, in a presentation by Frank Frankovsy at Interop, said it was taking a slightly different tack with its design, deciding to get input from others before actually making and releasing the hardware to the community. However, just because the hardware isn’t designed yet, Facebook isn’t going to twiddle its thumbs for a traditional multi-year design cycle. Frankovsky told me in an interview that he expects the hardware to b out in 9 to 12 months.

“We have built these islands of openness in the data center but the last element, and the one that was connecting the compute and storage, was the network,” said Frankovsky. “And there is a lot of pent-up passion out there for breaking open this appliance model.”

Networking is the last bastion of proprietary profits

Prepare to be disaggregated, switch!

For those who don’t dwell in data centers, the top-of-rack switch is the networking gear that sits on the top of a rack of servers directing traffic between those boxes and between the other racks in the data center. While the networking world is all aflutter over the promise of OpenFlow and software-defined networking, very little real progress has been made in building switches for the webscale data center.

Google, a few years back, had famously issued a request for a new type of switch that would fit its very specific scaled-out needs and no one responded. Now the search giant makes its own hardware. But soon after that, Andy Bechtolsheim saw the need for Google-like speeds and scale and started Arista, a switch company that has dominated in the webscale, financial and high-performance switching space. Meanwhile, at the lower end, Cisco’s cheaper Nexus line of switches have done really well.

Facebook’s Najam Ahmad.

Yet, these options aren’t palatable for Frankovsky or Najam Ahmad of Facebook (Ahmad will be at our Structure conference in June discussing more about Facebook’s networking strategy). On the existing product side, Frankovsky is frustrated by hardware that doesn’t play nicely at scale. He specifically mentioned that the side venting of heat on switches means he can’t place them right next to another switch. Ahmad, who is in charge of the social-networking giant’s network, is concerned about getting out of the proprietary OS model.

“We want it to be OS-agnostic so we can use one from our existing provider or build our own,” he said. He added that he’d prefer an open Linux-based implementation. These proprietary OSes — Cisco has IOS, Juniper has Junos and Arista has EOS — are one of the reasons that companies are locked into one networking gear provider. They are also stuck using proprietary code to make changes.

Who will be the Red Hat of the networking OS?

Networking cables along the ceiling at Facebook HQ.

If you are chock full of technically savvy people, losing the agility that comes from writing your own code as well as paying higher prices for the proprietary hardware and software combination is probably maddening. Hence Facebook’s interest in the open source OS. Of course, building out the underlying hardware is only the first step, the next will be supporting an OS that runs on top of that system.

While Facebook might build its own OS, not every company will want to do that, and Facebook may not open source its own networking OS if it ever makes one. That leaves a market opportunity. Perhaps a firm like Arista might move in here with an open source version of EOS, although given that Arista uses merchant silicon in its boxes, putting up an open-source version of its software would eat into its margins.

This is neither Open Flow nor SDN

But let’s go back to the box. Facebook is working with Broadcom, Intel, The Open Daylight Foundation, the Open Networking Foundation and Big Switch as some of its collaborators on this project. The box itself might run x86 hardware or a proprietary ASIC, according to Frankovsky. As for the protocols, Open Compute is going to see what the other collaborators want.

Software-defined networking

But for those wondering about Open Flow support, it’s likely. Frankovsky said that the Open Networking Foundation asked Facebook to get involved via the Open Compute Project with making open networking hardware. While Frankovsky and Ahmad didn’t cop to it, I know there has been frustration in many areas of the webscale and networking world that the promise of commodity hardware that Open Flow could offer has not really hit the market in a way that offers the most flexibility for data center operators.

Frankovsky said that the ONF approached Open Compute (Facebook is a founding member of both organizations) in part because it believed it could move quickly on this. And it will. But it’s worth noting that this announcement is about an open source top-of-rack switch, not a controller and not some type of software-defined networking play.

Other companies may take this box and perhaps an open source OS if one is developed, and then layer on some type of controller software to make a software-defined network, but this is just a box.

That being said, this is a box that could seriously disrupt the existing players in networking, from giants like Cisco and Dell all the way to smaller startups like NoviFlow or even Pica8. Much like Facebook is changing the server market with Open Compute, we’ll see if it can tweak the model and do the same in networking.

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DSSD was founded in 2010 by Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore — both part of a select few of engineers with experience building out storage operating systems. With the backing of Bechtolsheim, a Silicon Valley rock star and co-founder of Sun Microsystems, who has backed Google and co-founded switch startup Arista, the company has some of the smartest people in the Valley working there. No one from the company wanted to comment on the story.

My sources tell me the startup is building a new type of chip — they said it’s really a module, not a chip — that combines a small amount of processing power with a lot of densely-packed memory. The module runs a pared-down version of Linux designed for storing information on flash memory, and is aimed at big data and other workloads where reading and writing information to disk bogs down the application.

This fits with the expertise of the team, but this is a problem that others are trying to solve as well with faster and cheaper SSDs and targeted software to to optimize the flow of bits to a database. But the proposal here appears to be about designing an operating system that takes advantage of the difference in Flash memory when compared to hard drives to boost I/O.

For example, on old disk drives you store a group of bits in sequential order, but in reality those bits may get dropped anywhere in the drive. After regular use, when you delete a file, a tombstone marker is placed on the “deleted” file and you have to then find that tombstone and re-write just the amount of data in that space and then find more space for the rest. So the data goes everywhere.

But the DSSD system sounds like it treats files not as a series of bits but as an object that gets a name. That name is the file’s address and it stays the same for the life of the file. The result is there’s no central index that stands between sending the data to storage and storing it, and people can write to it in parallel and not worry abut overwrites. It is both faster and can scale out.

For more details, we can turn to the six patents that DSSD has filed. In mid-March Storage Mojo unearthed patents affiliated with the company that imply it is building a type of faster object-level storage using Flash that’s more durable. From the Storage Mojo article:

So what are they building? They are taking a radically different approach to the problem of high-performance transaction processing storage. The use of flash is a given in TP, and the extra durability, scalability and guaranteed read latency would be very attractive in large TP applications.

The most surprising piece is the object storage-like characteristics suggested by the patents. But handling billions of small objects at high-speed in a flat namespace would make it easy to distribute object indexes among hundreds of users, reducing file system I/O latency. The 3D RAID could eliminate the encoding overhead inherent in advanced erasure codes while providing similar robustness, enabling way-beyond-RAID6 availability.

For those who aren’t storage or computing buffs, the problem here was well explained in a fireside chat that Bechtolsheim had with my colleague Om Malik at our Structure:Data 2011 conference. In it Bechtolsheim outlines the problem that the network causes for access to big data around the 6-minute mark and the need to build new interfaces that can take advantage of the parallelism inside flash chips compared to hard disks. If you do that, you can expand the capabilities of flash beyond just density because you can write data to it faster, meaning the network no longer gums up the works.

Of course, when talking about using flash in more places, there’s always the question of whether this architecture will offer enough of a performance gain to justify the higher price per gigabyte of flash over a hard drive, but for that information we’ll just have to wait.

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That’s essentially what happened today when chip giant Intel hosted a call with Matt Adiletta, an Intel Fellow, who all the way back in 2006 was charged with figuring out what blade servers were all about. His journey of discovery took him to nascent cloud service providers, financial service CIOs, even Andy Bechtolsheim and has culminated in Intel’s embrace of what it calls microservers — highly dense, low-power machines aimed at emerging workloads.

Adiletta’s narrative danced around the fact that Intel is facing growing competition in this sector from established and new chip firms using the ARM-based architecture, but also that Intel has been pretty late to the microserver party — although it did coin that term. Even today, when it was parading an Intel Fellow before the press, the chip giant seems decidedly unenthusiastic about the segment and reluctant to claim they will be a big business.

Wait: how big is this microserver market?

When asked if he thought microservers would represent more than 10 percent of the market in the next three to four years — a number Intel has stuck with since 2011 — Adiletta hedged, saying, “I think it’s too early to tell, but it’s a reasonable first approximation … the software is evolving … but I think what we have to do is assume it is at least that.” He deflected then by noting, that while he and Intel may be unsure, “Our customers don’t know either.”

Adiletta also deflected questions about Intel’s decision to buy interconnect assets that might lead to the creation of fabrics for such highly dense servers or might allow Intel to integrate a switch onto a system on a chip for scale-out environments. Instead, the call was an attempted history lesson on how Intel has long believed in this sector, despite the fact that its initial launch of an interest in microservers back in 2011 was rushed and looked hastily put together as a reaction to ARM getting aggressive about the data center market.

Now that ARM has a bevy of server makers and chip firms embracing the idea of the ARM architecture in the data center, a growing software ecosystem, and 64-bit chips coming next year, Intel seems to be trying to walk the line between downplaying the market and assuring customers that it is ready for “wimpy cores.”

Intel embraces the big.Little strategy too

In general, Adiletta took as many opportunities as possible to point out how Intel has the chops to manage the data center and give enterprise customers what they want — even with a lower performance, low-power processor such as Atom — while underplaying the architecture changes that Intel has been making to Atom to get it ready for the server market. Adiletta also echoed the same Big.Little strategy that ARM has laid out for its next-generation chips — namely that it will have faster, brawnier Xeon cores that can be combined with lower-performance, more power efficient Atom cores.

He offered the example of a Hadoop cluster, a common use case for parallelized wimpy cores (see here for an x86 example or here for an ARM-based one). For the name nodes that send the processing job to the domain nodes, a more powerful Xeon core works better, while the processing could be handled by smaller, Atom cores, he said.

In the end, this call cemented what we already know about the coming fight between Intel and those pushing ARM-based products in the server market — Intel thinks it has the legacy software and understanding of what server customers need, while ARM will tout core designs that will consume less power.

And as much as it can’t stand to admit it, Intel is worried about losing the microserver part of its server business to ARM — a business that will probably end up being more than 10 percent of the market.

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With the funding secured, one of the first orders of business is to expand the private beta which launched in March in select — and unnamed — biotech and financial services companies, Kemp said in an interview.

“We provide a device that they can plug their services into and, boom, they’re going,” he said. Some of the other OpenStack clouds — such as those from Red Hat or Canonical — he said, will be more suited to hard-core techies that want to customize their clouds. Indeed, OpenStack clouds are starting proliferate with Rackspace, Internap, Hewlett-Packard , Piston Cloud (see disclosure), SUSE and other companies all fielding their own implementations.

Nebula, now with just under 60 employees, is in hiring mode, seeking system level engineers, product managers and others. “We’ve never really stopped recruiting,” Kemp said. Indeed. Just a few weeks ago, Nebula landed 7 developers from Rackspace, a fellow OpenStack collaborator and, to some degree, competitor.

Nebula will also move into a new Mountain View, Calif., facility since it’s bursting out of its current Palo Alto headquarters in the former Facebook office, Kemp said.

Comcast Ventures managing director Louis Toth said Nebula is particularly intriguing because of its management team — Kemp was formerly CTO of NASA and is one of the principal OpenStack architects — and its cloud deployment model. “The great thing about the Nebula Controller is you can take it and off-the-shelf white boxes and in a relatively short time set up a cloud and create hosted services for your user base,” he said. That’s an attractive model for both enterprises and small and medium businesses without a lot of IT resources.

Nebula, however, is coy about its total funding — it never disclosed how much it raised in its Series A round in July 2011.

Disclosure: Piston is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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When it comes to startups, a lot is made of a startup and its founders, the market opportunities, its advisers and the team. Of course, there is chest thumping around investors and the dollars raised. Yes, those are important issues, but let’s not forget about the role of timing. I was reminded of Andy’s comments when I read Benoit Felten’s post about the demise of Onlive. While there are  a multitude of reasons, including architectural problems, it seems that the lack of ultra-broadband is one of the main reasons why a service like Onlive (a cloud gaming service) found no traction.

Benoit pointed out that in 2003, there were a lot interesting online video startups, but they couldn’t get traction because broadband lacked oomph. Of course, a few years later when network speeds were up, YouTube was born and took the world by storm. History might be repeating itself, Benoit argues. I couldn’t help but agree, and said as much in a conversation with Bloomberg TV’s Emily Chang. I believe that Onlive came five years too soon. Why?

Future is not the past 

For starters, our definition of desktop software and desktop applications is going to change. It is not hard to imagine that what desktop games are today might not exist in five years, or that they could be an entirely new class of products? After all, the technologies that are the building blocks of our technology experiences are going through a sea change.

In the near future, if one reads the chip industry’s tea leaves, a personal compute client like the iPad will have twice or perhaps even four times the power of a contemporary laptop. With all the growth coming from those portable clients, it makes perfect sense for companies like Qualcomm to plow all their resources into developing mobile processing units with immense power and graphics ability.

The emergence of cloud is changing the software and what we expect from it. Furthermore, the presence of sensors in our compute devices could start to influence our online experiences, including games themselves. Why shouldn’t the Need for Speed change locations or graphics based on geo-location?

The Gigabit future

But more importantly in five years we can hope to have much faster pipes — both wired and wireless. The 1 Gbps experiments currently being conducted by Google in Kansas City and the 1 Gbps municipal network in Chattanooga, Tennessee are well positioned for these high-bandwidth applications. Benoit puts it well when he writes:

The sad thing is that when the tipping point for good quality broadband is reached, it will seem obvious looking back that this was a meaningful service concept, one users would be willing to pay for if they have good enough broadband (and are at least casual gamers, obviously). Just like there were many YouTube lookalikes before YouTube who all died for lack of decent broadband. [Fiber Evolution]

It is not just YouTube. Skype, which celebrated its 9th birthday recently, won mostly because it came at the right time. People were buying broadband and needed applications. Skype fit the job description and benefitted from it. Not many people remember Kozmo, a much-loved Internet delivery service that was a spectacular bust. A decade later we have companies like Postmates working on a similar concept.

Thanks to the growth of social media and mobile devices, a company like Postmates is able to find customers faster. The company, which launched its Get it Now app in May 2012, has seen a steady monthly increase (of about 43 percent) in its usage, The New York Times reports, and is processing about $100,000 worth of deliveries every month. Bastian Lehmann, the Postmates chief executive officer and a co-founder, told the Times that “With the penetration of smartphones, the world has changed, as has the ability to purchase through a mobile device.”

In five years, Onlive sadly will be forgotten — an idea caught in a timetrap, reinforcing the notion that when it comes to startups, timing is everything.

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What do tech luminaries Andy Bechtolsheim, Sky Dayton, Joi Ito and Brad Garlinghouse have in common? They’re all backing Diffbot, the startup that’s building visual robot technology that parses web site content to make it easier to reuse.

Diffbot, the first company funded out of Stanford’s StartX accelerator program, makes its APIs available to users wanting to extract the components of web pages in a way that makes that content reusable and easier to mash up into apps, Diffbot founder and CEO Michael Tung told me this week. It’s identified 18 web page types and the API handles two of them — front page and article — to date and is building support for the others.  GigaOM’s Ryan Kim covered the launch of Diffbot’s first APIs last fall.

Unlocking web content

“We’ve got this great thing, the Internet, full of web pages, the problem is they’re made for human beings to read and understand, particularly people in front of a browser … but that’s inaccessible to software applications, hundreds of thousands of apps like Siri, that only work with a handful of APIs that they’re hard-coded for,” Tung said.

“Yelp is great for searching places, Flipboard is great for discovering news. Our main insight is the web can be broken down into 18 types of pages, news, people,places, photos, etc. and our goal is to teach a machine to understand all that,” Tung said. The company is working on more APIs to bring all that content into its reach.

At a recent hackathon, one participant built a web reader for his blind father using Diffbot’s APIs. “For a blind person, using the web is miserable. [Today's] screen readers read all the text starting at the top, including the nav bar and scroll down. Diffbot analyses that page, determines the title, author, text and can read it in a more natural way,” Tung said.

Diffbot can look at web pages created for human beings and analyze them visually  so the app can treat the web as a big data base. It is now processing more 100 million API calls monthly for software developers using the service for Web site mobilization, tag generation and other functions.

A-list backers

Bechtolsheim, the founder of Sun Microsystems; Sky Dayton, founder of Earthlink and Boingo; Joi Ito,  director of the MIT Media Lab: Brad Garlinghouse, a former Yahoo exec and now CEO of YouSendIt (see disclosure)  all invested in this $2 million seed round as did Jonathan Heiliger, the Facebook vet now at North Bridge Venture Capital Partners.

The company is using a freemium model, encouraging developers and others to submit URLs to the system for content extraction. The service is free up to a certain number of API calls.  ”We want to apply Diffbot to the entire web, but it’s expensive to build a web crawler; we only analyze the URLs that people send us,” Tung said.

John Davi, Diffbot’s VP of product and a Cisco veteran, said the submissions in themselves will be valuable. “Our long-term vision is to avail ourselves of the cream of the content that comes out. We’ll be able to see the important pages — the articles and recipes that people submit — and we think there’s value in knowing that.”

Disclosure: YouSendIt is backed by Alloy Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media.

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The company is building a new very high-speed data center switch along with a software management platform. This is a really hot market — massive data center build outs have already made Arista Networks, a high-speed ethernet switch company co-founded by Andy Bechtolsheim, an IPO candidate for early 2013.  In the early-stage startup scene Nicira, a company building a controller for scaled out programmable networks, has been the victim of corporate espionage and other vendors such as Big Switch are gearing up their marketing efforts to discredit rivals.

Arista’s success (which is spearheaded by former Cisco executive Jayshree Ullal) and the threat that commodity networking gear and programmable networks poses to its business has made Cisco aware that it needs to increase its footprint in the data center business. As a result, it has put three of its senior people — Mazzola, Jain, and Cafiero — on the job. Their mission is clear — get Cisco into this market fast, and then be rewarded with millions.

Cisco has dangled the mega-million dollar carrot before and it has worked. Of course, a more politically correct way of describing the carrot is “spin-in.”  In other words, Insiemi is a company created to build a specific product, which is designed to fill a gaping hole in Cisco’s product line. The payoff for the founder trio is that Cisco will buy their startup and put millions in their pockets. It is not the first time the three musketeers have done a Cisco spin-in and laughed all the way to the bank. Andiamo Systems, a storage networking company was the first such effort. Then came Nuova Systems (which created the Nexus switch technology) which was acquired for $678 million.

Not surprisingly, Cisco is fighting a market that has already attracted many players. Arista Networks, Big Switch Networks and Nicira are some of the more well known participants in the business generically labelled “software defined networking.” There are others such as Vello Systems who are much less known, but are doing brisk business. Of the lot, Arista is the one that seems to have the potential to become the Juniper of data center business.

Understanding that they are playing catch-up, Cisco and by extension Insiemi executives have undertaken some aggressive moves that are ruffling some feathers in the small networking world. For instance, my sources say that the company is promising nearly $2 million (as an eventual pay-off) to engineers and executives who are willing switch loyalties from one of their rivals.

Correction: So far, nine of them have switched. Arista and Nicira have lost four executives each while Big Switch has lost one team member.

An earlier version of the story said that Arista and Nicira had lost four executives each to poaching by Inseimi. In fact, neither company lost any executives as part of that campaign. Inseimi rivals that include Arista, Nicira, Big Switch Networks and Cumulus Systems, have lost of a total of five engineers to the Cisco-backed rival’s poaching efforts. Other engineers at those companies were offered jobs by Inseimi, but ultimately decided not to take them. And my sources tell me that Inseimi isn’t done yet trying to recruit talent away from those companies.

As for the spin-in threesome who have a propensity for naming the “spin-in” with cute Italian names: let’s go (Andiamo), new (Nuova) and collection (insemi): here are two names they might want to consider for their future startups: pagamento (Payment) and/or ricompensa (reward.)

Here is a bit of text  from an email that is being used by a headhunter doing Insiemi’s bidding.

The thing about this new venture (beyond its technical innovation) which makes it particularly unique and rare is that it is a virtual guarantee for high financial payout to those who join especially at this early stage because of the pre-arrangement. Though the company is just a few weeks old, the NY Times is already following it..

I would like to take just a few minutes of your time to discuss the job and provide you enough info to consider it one way or another. We are pulling together a team of great people from Brocade, Google, Juniper, VMware and a host of great start ups too.

 

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I recently spoke with McNealy as part of GigaOM’s special New Year’s package, and a portion of that interview went up this morning (my favorite quote from the piece: “What Steve Jobs understood was that he was more like Calvin Klein than he was like Andy Bechtolsheim.”). But the post doesn’t cover the entirety of our conversation, specifically McNealy’s thoughts on launching his new company, WayIn, as an IT celebrity and a proven enterprise CEO.

According to McNealy, knowing how venture capital works and knowing seemingly everyone in California makes for an entirely different experience. “It [WayIn] was actually a little easier probably than it should have been,” McNealy told me. “I keep telling our folks, ‘You know, you’re gonna have to keep the intensity level up.’”

Just flip through the Rolodex

The launch was relatively easy, he explained, because McNealy, who serves as chairman of the board, and the rest of his who’s-who board are very well-connected. McNealy, for example, personally called AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, and now the WayIn app will be built into 12 or 13 million U-Verse set-top boxes.

Ditto for PGA president Tim Finchem, who got WayIn running on the President’s Cup website. To get WayIn incorporated into the Los Angeles Kings’ website, McNealy had to take the extra step of calling a friend who knows the team well.

Other notable members of WayIn’s board are uber-lawyer Larry Sonsini, Newmont Mining EVP Bill MacGowan, television producer Burt Sugarman and pro sports executive Greg Jamison.

“That seems kind of like cheating,” McNealy said. “It’s just been a series this year of reconnecting with all these people I know and connecting the WayIn to these folks.”

Contrast that to the early days of Sun: “I remember a year and a half into it, we finally got a one-line mention in Fortune magazine, I think it was, and we were all excited.”

Getting venture capital right

WayIn was also able to raise $6.3 million without seeking out VC funding, McNealy said, which has serious benefits for shareholders. “Raising money was very hard to do [when Sun launched], and we gave away most of the company to the venture capitalists,” he said. “They’re the ones who really made out like bandits on the company.”

“What [venture capitalists] want to do is get a company that’s valued at $4 million, give it two [million dollars], and own half the company, he added. “And we’re kind of beyond that day one.”

Not that McNealy is anti-venture-capital. Sun’s early investors such as John Doerr, Dave Marquardt and Doug Boyles added a lot of value, McNealy said, “but they extracted a lot of value in return.” WayIn itself likely will raise VC money in its Series B round, McNealy said, it just has the luxury of doing it on its own terms to a larger degree than most startups do.

Some things never change

One shouldn’t mistake McNealy’s honesty about WayIn’s experience, connections and cash with cockiness, however. The social-mobile space in which WayIn plays is quite different from the enterprise IT world in McNealy made his name and fortune, and all the contacts in the world won’t make up for a short-sighted business plan.

“The real key is to make sure we use all of those assets efficiently and effectively,” McNealy said, “and we’re really taking a big enough swipe at the market to be revolutionary and not just evolutionary.”

Image courtesy of Flickr user deege@fermentarium.com.

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