Dante Malagrino, Co-Founder and CEO, Embrane; Jonathan Heiliger, General Partner, North Bridge Venture Partners; Martin Casado, Co-Founder and CTO, Niciria
(c)2012 Pinar Ozger pinar@pinarozger.com

“Infrastructure of the future will be programmed,” said Dante Malagrinò, co-founder and CEO of Embrane, at GigaOM’s Structure conference on Thursday. That’s a shift from how much of the current data center infrastructure, and networks, are configured, and this evolution has profound implications on who manages it, how it works and how you evaluate it, says Malagrinò.

So what exactly are software-defined data centers? According to Martin Casado, Co-Founder and CTO of Nicira, you can spot them by their reliance on software to tie together the generic hardware and components that are being used to fill massive football field-sized data centers. The generic hardware might have high failure rates, but the software acts as a orchestration layer, explained Casado. It’s a way to “scale out, instead of scaling up,” he said.

Jonathan Heiliger, a General Partner with North Bridge Venture Partners, and a former Facebook exec, called software-defined datacenters “a neat idea,” and said it’s “about giving developers the power to control the underlying elements that their applications use, whether that’s the network or servers or other resources that their serving.” Developers can get in there and manipulate the system, which is a total flip about from how it was previously deployed and managed, said Heiliger.

Malagrinò called software-defined data centers the buzz word over the next twelve months. So expect to hear a lot more about this trend. It’s a shift from the administrator managing the network to a figure of a coder or developer taking over, said Malagrinò.

Check out the rest of our Structure 2012 coverage, as well as the live stream, here.

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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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We at GigaOM talk to a lot of startups, VCs and big companies buying up cloud startups — and the some names keep coming up again and again. Some of these guys (yes, they are all guys) have specialities within infrastructure, like networking or chips, while others are particularly skilled at building companies. With the list below, we’ve picked the VCs that are doing deals and real knowledge and influence in the space. On the up-and-comers list are newer VCs and those working with very early-stage companies, which means they haven’t had any exits yet.

If you’re building an infrastructure startup, these are the guys you’d want on your team.  (They’re listed in alphabetical order.)

The tried and true.

Alex Benik: General Partner at Battery Ventures
Current deals: Cumulus Networks, VSS Monitoring and Traceltyics
Exits: Anobit, which sold to Apple and Optichron, which was acquired by Netlogic.
Our take: Networking and semiconductors are some of Benik’s favorite topics, and he also has a lot of connections into Wall Street’s IT shops where enterprise meets webscale. He’s one of the few VCs (along with others at Battery) who still invests in semiconductors.

John Connors: Partner at Ignition Partners
Current deals: Opscode, Splunk, Tier 3
Exits: Heroku, which sold to Salesforce.com, Xensource which sold to Citirx, Likewise which sold to EMC
Our take: His experience as the former CFO of Microsoft means he has business savvy and plenty of connections (he’s on the board at Nike), plus his track record in the cloud space as an investors speaks for itself.

Satish Dharmaraj: General Partner at Redpoint Ventures
Current deals: MapR, StorSimple
Exits: Cloud.com which sold to Citrix and Posterous, which was acquired by Twitter
Our take: Dharmaraj has a special affinity for where the cloud meets the consumer, especially on a mobile device. He’s also part of the team that scouts for investments that Verizon can make to populate and better its 4G network.

Peter Fenton: General Partner at Benchmark Capital
Current deals: EngineYard, New Relic, DotCloud, Twitter
Exits: SpringSource, which he sold to VMware, and JBoss, which he sold to RedHat.
Our take: Fenton is super connected, and he understands large webscale platforms better than anyone.

Ben Horowitz: General partner at Andreessen Horowitz
Current deals: Factual, Nicira, Okta
Exits: Andreesen Horowitz is new enough that Horowitz doesn’t have infrastructure exits associated with it yet, except for Fusion-io’s public offering in 2011.
Our take: He has a lot of operational experience and built a cloud company before it was cool. On top on that he has a breadth of investments that help him understand the big picture.

Ping Li: General Partner Accel Partners
Current deals: Nimble Storage, Nimbula and ScaleXtreme
Exits: Reactivity which cold to Cisco and Fusion-io which went public in 2011
Our take: Li gets webscale at the consumer level and also understands what it takes from the infrastructure side to build it. He’s also in charge of Accel’s Big Data Fund and will have a front row seat to the infrastructure requirements of the big data era.

John Vrionis: Managing director at Lightspeed Venture Partners
Current deals: Embrane, Tintri, Niciria, Boundary
Exits: IO Turbine which sold to Fusion-io and Pliant which sold to SanDisk
Our take: Vrionis has a very clear view of the changes happening in the networking world inside the data center, but he’s also thinking big thoughts on big data and the infrastructure to support it.

The up-and-comers.

Mike Abbott: Investment Partner at Kleiner Perkins
Current deals: Abbott joined KPCB in December of 2011 so we’re still waiting on his portfolio
Our take: Abbott is a practitioner who helps grow Twitter’s infrastructure and engineering team. He also helped create Palm’s next-generation webOS platform and while new at the VC game, he has connections and knowledge to help entrepreneurs find their way in a mobile and cloud world.

Puneet Agarwal: Partner at True Ventures (see disclosure)
Current deals: Puppet Labs, Loggly, Urban Airship, Piston Cloud
Our take: Agarwal is best at the ooey-gooey middle layers between the hardware and the software. Think configuration management software or PaaSes, and with he’s comfortable working at the early stages, so is a good place to start when you’re tossing around an idea.

Frank Artale: Partner at Ignition Partners
Current deals: ServiceMesh, Bromium, AppFog, ScaleXtreme
Exits: He’s only been at Ignition since 2011.
Our take: Artale is one of two Ignition Partners team members on the list. His experience building sales channels at Citrix and focus on making cool tech into a marketable product is invaluable for starry-eyed entrepreneurs who think they have something cool, but don’t know how to make money off of it.

Jonathan Heiliger: General partner at North Bridge Venture Partners
Current deals: none yet at North Bridge, but he is invested in Tango and Sonus Networks
Exits: Last.fm which sold to CBS and Contendo, which sold to Akamai
Our take: His investments remain to be seen, but when it comes to scaling infrastructure and knowing the people who know how to build at webscale, Heiliger has the contacts and the knowledge base. Plus, he’s a nice guy.

Mike Volpi: Partner at Index Ventures
Current deals: Big Switch Networks, StorSimple and Path
Exits: Cloud.com, which sold to Citrix
Our take: Volpi is not exactly and up and comer in the investment space, but he hasn’t done that many cloud deals. But as networking rises in importance we expect him to make a splash. He also knows the enterprise sales channel better than anyone else thanks to his time at Cisco.

Disclosure: Puneet Agarwal is a partner at True Ventures which 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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Heiliger has important bona fides and his hiring represents a coup for North Bridge.  As Facebook’s former VP of technical operations,  he spearheaded the build-out infrastructure so it didn’t melt down as Facebook’s user base soared from 30 million to more than 800 million, according to this Fortune Magazine report. He also led Facebook’s Open Compute Project, an attempt by the social networking giant to bring collaborative design principles from the open-source software world into the more staid realm of data center hardware.

North Bridge is based in Waltham, Mass. with just three general partners in its Silicon Valley office, so Heiliger will help expand its presence there.  There he will work with Paul Santinelli who has known Heiliger from years ago when they both worked at GlobalCenter.

Heiliger who left Facebook last May, started out at the ripe age of 19 when he  co-founded  ISP GlobalCenter, according to The San Jose Mercury News. Later, he was an early employee of Loudcloud, a startup launched by Marc Andreessen.

And that’s not all: Heiliger was chief of engineering for Walmart’swebsite. He clearly knows his computing infrastructure, and infrastructure companies are North Bridge’s forte.

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After spending four years at Facebook — Heiliger joined the company in 2007 just before its mad dash to the top began — he said in an interview that he needs a breather. During his stay, Facebook has grown 20 times in size and with growth came significant challenges. “We have gone through a few close calls to significant disasters,” he says. “There were times when we were out of capacity with no more servers available.”

Jonathan oversaw Facebook’s global infrastructure and internal technology systems. Heiliger who joined Facebook after spending time at LoudCloud, Danger and GlobalCenter looks back at his time with the social web giant with fondness. “It was my fourth startup and frankly I didn’t think I had another startup in me,” he says. “We eclipsed many goals and set new ones.”

Of those goals, Heiliger speaks of recent launch of Facebook’s bespoke data center with much fondness. Well spoken and very dapper, Heiliger has often used his understated style and position at Facebook to rebuke and goad established giants into action. A repeat speaker at our first Structure conference, Jonathan chastised the chip industry for building processors and never really understanding the needs of web-centric companies such as Facebook.

His comments set-off a furor that eventually led to web giants and chip companies such as Intel and AMD working closely. More recently, Heiliger help shepherd the Open Compute project, that saw Facebook open source not only it data center designs but also share its server designs. The Open Compute project will be Jonathan’s legacy, for it has the chance of disrupting the server ecosystem.

When I asked Jonathan what surprised him the most during his stay at Facebook, he said it was how quickly the site grew. Today the infrastructure team is bigger, but he said that the same philosophy of experimenting and constant improvements is what will keep the company’s technology debt very low.

Heileger is one of the early Facebook team members that includes Adam D’Angelo, Charlie Cheever, Dustin Moskovitz, Jeff Hammerbacher and Matt Cohler. His decision to leave Facebook is an end of an era.

PS: Jonathan will be at our Structure 2011 conference. Be sure to say hello to him at the conference.

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That is why he is super excited about the formation of the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), a not-for-profit industry group that has been established to promote software-defined networks. ONF is being established with the backing of Internet giants Google, Yahoo and Facebook, along with Microsoft, Verizon and Deutsche Telekom. The foundation also has the backing of numerous hardware makers such as Broadcom, Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM, Juniper Networks, Marvell, NEC, Netgear and VMware.

The first task of ONF will be to adopt and then lead the ongoing development of the OpenFlow standard (www.openflow.org) and encourage its adoption by freely licensing it to all member companies. ONF will then begin the process of defining global management interfaces. (ONF Press Release)

At the core of the ONF is a piece of software, Open Flow, that was result of a joint research project between Stanford University and University of Berkeley. In her article earlier this year, Stacey Higginbotham thus described the Open Flow effort:

The idea behind the OpenFlow effort is that today’s network needs to be smarter and more flexible in order to handle and efficiently deliver more information. To do that, the fundamental idea is to separate the packet switching mechanisms and control functions. Users can freely develop and operate control middleware independently of the switching mechanism.

One of ONF’s big proponents, Nick McKeown, ONF Board member and professor at Stanford University when speaking at our Structure conference in June 2010 outlined his vision of software defined networks as becoming core to the future of the Internet.

McKeown pointed out that from big Internet companies to telecoms and data center operators, many are already experimenting with the idea of software-defined networking, and that is why it made perfect sense for various parties to come together and put all the momentum behind Open Flow.

In a phone conversation earlier today, McKeown explained that at its crudest, Open Flow is akin to the BIOS inside a personal computer, which is firmware software that talks to all hardware elements and then helps boot up the operating system (OS). On top of the BIOS sits the OS and upon the OS sit the applications. So Open Flow can view all the network elements (switches for instance) and then work with the a network operating system which in turn be used to build optimized applications.

Unlike the past when enterprises were often the cutting edge customers, today it is giants like Google and Facebook, who are often the purveyor’s of cutting edge technology and techniques. Their needs are very different from the hardware that is made and sold by companies like Cisco or Force 10, mostly because those companies cannot make hardware optimized for the needs for a specific web-organization. In addition, the gear supports a whole range of standards, which adds overhead and slows down the performance for a web company.

While networking technologies have also evolved in this time, the ONF believes that more rapid innovation is needed. SDN fulfills this need by enabling innovation in all kinds of networks through relatively simple software changes. SDN thus gives owners and operators of networks better control over their networks, allowing them to optimize network behavior to best serve their and their customers’ needs. (ONF Press Release)

Now, you can unleash the power of creative software writers at the network layer and use the networking infrastructure more effectively, said Facebook’s Heiliger. So for instance, Facebook could write its own network OS – and they are thinking about it – and write software applications to take advantage of the network.

For instance, a Hadoop-based application could use the network in the wee-hours of the morning to crunch data at a certain data center, depending on its geographical location and workload. During the day, the data center’s network is optimized for an all-together different application. “This opens up a Pandora’s box of creativity,” said Heiliger.

ONF has found favor amongst the academic communities for a long time, but with the establishment of ONF, it seems we are looking at a bright, commercial future for Open Flow, which is one of the more disruptive developments in the world of networking technology.

Today, theoretically speaking, a giant Internet company like Google can buy networking silicon from Broadcom, and build its own commodity switches and create its own network topography using Open Flow.  What cost millions of dollars could be built for tens of thousands of dollars – and that is going to change the economics of the data centers.

An apt analogy to me would be the arrival of x86 servers and their impact on Sun’s E10K super servers. In time, the minnows ate away at the whale. I wouldn’t be surprised if the same happens to the switching business first, and then to other elements of the networking ecosystem. An engineer familiar with the Open Flow technology joked that Open Flow frees you from the tyranny of the firmware providers. That is networking speak for Cisco, Juniper and Force 10 Networks.

Urs Hoelzle, Google’s Senior Vice President of Engineering at Google and ONF President and Chairman of the Board predicted that by end of this year we are going to see first of the Open Flow capable hardware come to market. In addition, he expects to see Open Flow 1.1-based controllers for data centers to come to market as well. Martin Casado who was one of the primary researchers on Open Flow has co-founded Nicira, which is building the Open Flow controller for the data centers, while Big Switch Networks, a stealth mode company is currently working on an Open Flow controller for the enterprise market.

Hoelzle cautioned that I shouldn’t get too ahead of myself, because it will be a couple of years before the technology starts to make its way through different elements of the networking hardware stack. When I asked him if we could one day see Open Flow make its way into our home networking gear – our home networks are getting inherently complex after all – Hoelzle said that is won’t be anytime soon, but it is within realm of possibility.

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“Clustrix has built a truly impressive Clustered Database System from which Internet-scale businesses can benefit,” said Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook VP of technical operations in a press statement. When writing about the company back in May 2010, Stacey pointed out that this clustered database system was webscale’s Holy Grail.

Paul Mikesell — CEO of Clustrix and the former co-founder of storage system success story Isilon — told Stacey the appliance being built by his company would be ideal ” for companies managing large amounts of data, such as big travel, e-commerce and social websites.” Heiliger believes that CDS can “make it very easy for fast-growing companies to scale their infrastructure, and enhance reliability, while driving down cost and complexity.”

Clustrix is backed by Sequoia Capital, U.S. Venture Partners (USVP), and ATA Ventures.

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The biggest lesson he’s learned in the past year is “you can never think about scale too early,” Heiliger said at GigaOM’s Structure conference today. “We’ve thought really far ahead but we’ve also punted on really critical things that we needed to do,” he said. “Now we’re under the gun rather than being able to do them on our own time.”

Heiliger didn’t specify what Facebook had punted on, however he mentioned the company has replaced some of its larger systems such as the way it serves platform traffic. Facebook has also undertaken recent projects to improve site speed. A couple months ago the company killed its “Facebook Lite” product (a re-engineered version of the site built to be extremely fast), with the explanation being partly that the learnings from building a streamlined version had been incorporated into the main product.

But scaling Facebook is also about continual evolution, said Heiliger. A huge part of the service’s infrastructure success comes by way of benefiting from and contributing back to open-source technologies, he said, naming HipHop for optimizing PHP code and Haystack for managing its massive amounts of photos (1 million delivered per second, expected to be 10 times that within a year, he said).

Facebook primarily relies on its own infrastructure because it likes the agility, performance and cost reductions that come from control, Heiliger said. (On the negative side, that’s led to the unforeseen “bottlenecks” that Heiliger said he regrets punting on.) The company is now building its first data center in Oregon, which Heiliger said is due to be turned on soon. But he advised young web startups to do the opposite — at least to start.

“For a consumer web site starting today I would absolutely use the cloud,” he said. “I wouldn’t hire someone like me — we’re really irritating, cynical people and we make silly remarks at conferences.”

Heiliger was referring to widely publicized comments he made a year ago at Structure 09, where he threw down the gauntlet for semiconductor and hardware makers, saying they weren’t up to the task of serving the needs of enormous, growing web businesses like Facebook.

Today, Heiliger said those companies have come a long way in the last year. Facebook recently released a benchmark paper on CPUs, finding a 45 percent improvement in dollars per watt between this generation and the last. Heiliger also mentioned startups such as SeaMicro and Tilera and their promising multicore efforts, saying Intel and AMD were also pushing similar projects. (The CTOs of both SeaMicro and Tilera spoke at Structure yesterday.)

However. Heiliger invited cloud hosting providers to contact him with proposals. “At Facebook we look once or twice a year if we should put more infrastructure in the cloud or ourselves,” he said.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my bio.

http://cdn.livestream.com/grid/LSPlayer.swf?channel=gigaomtv&clip=pla_2416074e-5e41-40d4-8d22-f77bc75f35d9&autoPlay=false&mute=false

Industry-standard benchmarks, such as those published by The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) can be reasonable indicators of maximum throughput for certain workloads.  At Facebook, we recognized these benchmarks wouldn’t necessarily represent our application behavior under real-world conditions and developed a proprietary analysis methodology.

Frustration with those specifications is what led to the building of Facebook’s capacity testing tool, Dyno, which the company has been using since July. Yesterday, Jonathan and two of his colleagues, Marco Baray and Jason Taylor, shared some details as to how, exactly, Facebook benchmark’s server performance — and how that’s helped them squeeze the most out of their machines. The findings are shared in a white paper entitled “Real-World Web Application Benchmarking” (embedded at the end of this post.) Taylor spearheaded the project for Facebook.

“We wanted to get rid of the ad-hoc nature of server performance measurement and deployment,” said Heiliger of Dyno. Named after a Dynamometer, a device that measures force or power, typically in automobiles, Dyno does the same for Facebook servers. “Effectively we are doing the same for the servers where we are focused on throughput and server capacity,” says Heiliger. “When you get to a certain scale, say, 100 servers, you need to have something like Dyno.” It also allows the company to constantly optimize its software stack to derive the most out of its hardware. “It allows us to more effectively measure the performance of our server infrastructure and then derive the most out of it,” said Heiliger. From the white paper:

Anecdotally, when Facebook switched from an FB-DIMM platform to the Intel San Clemente platform, utilizing DDR2 memory, we observed an unexpected increase in throughput.  This performance boost initiated an investigation that found the web application to be memory- and CPU-bound.  The decreased latency of the DDR2 architecture provided a significant increase in web node throughput.

Baray explained that as Facebook adds more features to its service, it becomes more complex. “The web site becomes heavier, so we need to constantly adapt our capacity and figure out how we manage it smartly,” he said. In order to do that, the company needs to constantly monitor its data as effectively as possible. And that’s where Dyno comes in handy.

For example, the company recently added new servers that were based on Intel’s NehlamNehalem/Tylersburg chip architecture — which delivered a markedly superior performance over its existing Harpertown-based servers. “There was an over 40 percent difference, which is huge when you have thousands of servers,” said Heiliger.

Knowing which servers can handle more loads and provide more throughput allows Facebook to dynamically shift traffic loads around in order to achieve the top performance. Facebook has more than 30,000 servers, according to some estimates. The company adds roughly 10,000 new ones every 18 months. The company can’t afford to not squeeze the most out of its machines.

Real World Bench Marking v10

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Heiliger said that Facebook had originally planned for people to claim their usernames in an auction-style format, and the project was code-named “Hammer.” In the end, the company decided that usernames would be claimed on a first-come-first-serve basis — but the launch’s code name remained. “We decided to keep the ‘Hammer’ code name because it was going to hammer our site,” Heiliger said.

As we all know, the launch went off without a hitch. It was successful because Facebook had extensively tested the launch on the backend of the site, Heiliger said. During the testing, Facebook isolated the username function from all the other services on the site. Heiliger credited this strategy for the rollout going smoothly. Facebook even delayed the release two weeks to ensure it was successful and had extra hardware standing by in case users jammed the site.

Heiliger had strong words for OEMs and system builders during his chat with Om. To compete with sites like Facebook and Google, Heiliger said, OEMs and system builders need to be more power- and cost-efficient. “You guys just don’t get it,” he said, adding that Facebook has reaped success from investing heavily in its infrastructure.

Video of the chat is here:

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