Yet, that’s inevitable for companies such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo, Facebook and others. Even as Netflix outsources most of its IT operations to Amazon, Amazon must figure out how to economically scale its business — and having the old industry standard of one systems administrator managing 500 or maybe 1,000 servers isn’t going to let AWS keep dropping prices. This is why a partnership between data center networking hardware company Plexxi and network monitoring company Boundary intrigues me.

The two companies have created a means for customers who have Plexxi gear installed in their networks to use data provided by Boundary’s monitoring service to automatically adapt the network in real time to the demands of an application. So if Boundary determines that the network flows it’s monitoring are slowing down because the database isn’t feeding information fast enough to the CPU, Plexxi can widen the available bandwidth between those two units until the bottleneck is resolved.

Having covered IT for over a decade, I can tell you that I’ve seen a lot of marketing around this stuff, but once you dug deeper, the caveats and clunky integrations stole a lot of the possible benefits. But the ability to share information using APIs, plus both companies hewing to the idea that they are creating open platforms has made integration relatively simple.

Boundary’s service discovers a latency problem.

Plexxi begins to address the problem by changing the physical network.

“We’re two companies that share a vision around the abstraction of what we call affinities — stuff that wants to be grouped together,” said David Husak, Plexxi’s CEO. “Boundary can look at the activites of those services and derive affinities, and then Plexxi can do something with it. This is not exclusive between Boundary and Plexxi, but we’re both performing and rallying around this idea of affinity abstraction and that’s what makes it powerful.”

That doesn’t mean there aren’t caveats. This only works for those using Plexxi gear, so people running in cloud environments such as Amazon’s EC2 can’t do this yet. And Plexxi’s gear is pretty new on the ground, so it’s unclear how big the customer base it. One also has to subscribe to Boundary’s service, but there are hundreds who use the free version and 80-something customers on the paid version today.

And if this doesn’t work for most people, that might be alright because startup Lyatiss, a company I covered last month is trying to do something similar with its software. It’s stuff will work in Amazon’s EC2, although so far it only has the monitoring component as opposed to the automatic scaling element. However, thanks to APIs, an acceptance that vertical integration doesn’t work in servers, networking or in storage, and the demands of scale out data centers we may be closer than ever to application-aware infrastructure. The kind of IT that when it’s broken (or approaching broken) can right itself.

That’s pretty cool, and it’s exactly what we’ll need if we want our computing to scale.

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• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
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This is how I have broken them down, and where I think things are heading based on my talks with vendors and customers in all of these industries, but I hope to hear from others who may have different opinions. Let’s get to it.

Enterprise: This is the traditional IT system, comprised of what might be a mix of conventional servers that may or may not be virtualized. This is the world where people buy HP(shpq), Dell( s dell) or IBM servers, specialized data warehousing solutions and oodles of Cisco and Juniper networking gear. These companies probably also have a few specialty Sun or Power PC machines supporting older applications that they don’t want to touch.

Their legacy applications depend on this stuff and they have a lot of legacy applications! This is an area where there’s plenty of money to be made, but it’s not where the growth in infrastructure spending will come from. For startups, especially those commercializing open source technology that’s interesting to the enterprise, this is a market that many overlook at first, and only later find themselves getting called into it with requests for proposals on Hadoop distributions or software-defined network help. The companies will buy some SaaS offerings and maybe a few test infrastructure-as-a-service efforts for non-crucial apps, but aren’t leaving their old infrastructure behind. They also don’t want to mess with tinkering, so issues like openness aren’t as essential as ease of deployment and management.

Webscale: Companies such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo, sections of Microsoft and other large online properties fit in this category. For these companies, IT isn’t just a cost of doing business, it’s the enabler for their business, much like a kitchen is for a restaurant. So just how Taco Bell tries to streamline a few ingredients into many cheap menu options in order to keep costs low, these companies streamline their hardware into a few highly optimized pools of computing for what will likely become several services offered on their platform.

These companies buy servers by the rack, and have the engineering resources to write code and implement new technologies that can save them money or speed up their ability to deliver services. Issues like interoperability and openness are important to them because they want their pieces to be as modular and as programmable as possible so they can tweak it to their needs. While their numbers may be few, they are a huge and growing segment of the market.

Cloud: I divide cloud into two categories. The more modern clouds, such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon’s Web Services that look more like the webscale architectures, and telco and service provider clouds that oftentimes have more of the enterprise gear (or specially built gear from enterprise vendors for the cloud.) An example of such gear would be Cisco’s Unified Computing System. In general the clouds following the webscale model may have some equipment closer to the data-specific or HPC (high-performance computing) clouds, but are content to put the engineering effort into making their clouds work optimally themselves. They will also have similar cost imperatives, continually worrying about how to continue scaling out without driving up costs.

As for the telco clouds and hosting companies that are getting into cloud environments, the industry seems to be in a state of flux, as the providers of such clouds realize that their first efforts were often times built around replicating enterprise environments and trying to force them to scale. Some, like Rackspace, have taken a different tack, throwing their hats in with Open Compute and the webscale guys while others have tried to use their existing gear (and the expertise of outside engineers) with cloud optimized software such as Open Stack or the products from Joyent or Eucalyptus.

HPC and Data: This is the area where I’m having the most trouble, in part because data analytics is so new. I lumped them together in the last few years mostly because both styles of computing are able to take advantage of massively parallel compute architectures and require fast interconnects. But there are differences, especially as low-power ARM-based chips tied together with fabrics enter the equation. Those smaller chips can be more energy-efficient for processing data, because many of the problems associated with data can be broken up into really small bits whereas in high performance computing powerful cores are still the norm — they might be massively parallel and distributed, but these are some of the brawniest cores out there. I think as we continue in 2013, we’ll see these categories split.

I’m also curious how many categories we will have in the next three years or so and what pieces each style of computing will borrow from another. As I said before, this is my mental map of computing influenced by the need for performance, cost and fast interconnects combined with the people on the ground at the buyer and their willingness to tinker. I’d love to hear from y’all about your take on these categories and where they might be headed.

Finch image courtesy of Flickr user Keith Ellwood.

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• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
• Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight
• Infrastructure Overview, Q2 2010

The list of honorees follows below, and it’s a list packed with newcomers as well as Silicon Valley veterans. Thanks to all for voting in the nomination process, and now that we’ve narrowed it down to five candidates for each award, don’t forget to vote for which person or company you think is most deserving. Voting begins today (the voting page can be found here, and the rules are here) and closes on January 24th.

As a reminder, the Crunchies, a joint production with our friends at Techcrunch and Venturebeat, will take place on Thursday, January 31, 2013, from 7:30pm to 11:30pm at Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness Ave, San Francisco. You can purchase tickets here.

So, without any further delay, the nominees for the 2012 Crunchies are as follows:

Best Technology Achievement
Baumgartner Jump
Google Glass
Mars Curiosity
SpaceX docks with International Space Station
Tesla Supercharger Network

Best Collaborative Consumption Service
Airbnb
Get It Now/Postmates
Lyft
TaskRabbit
Uber

Best E-Commerce Application
Fab
Hotel Tonight
Karma/Facebook Gifts
Warby Parker
Zulily

Best Mobile Application
Evernote
Google Maps
Grindr
Instagram
Square

Fastest Rising Startup
Exec
Lyft
Pinterest
Snapchat
Stripe

Best Content Discovery Application
Flipboard
Instapaper
Pinterest
Prismatic
Tumblr

Best Design
Facebook Timeline
Medium
Paper by FiftyThree
Square
Svbtle

Best Bootstrapped Startup
FreshBooks
Instapaper
Nimbus
Techmeme
Upverter

Sexiest Enterprise Startup
Asana
Box
Cloudera
Plexxi
Zendesk

Best International Startup
Hailo
Rovio
Soundcloud
Spotify
Xiaomi

Best Education Startup
Codecademy
Coursera
Edmodo
Khan Academy
Udacity

Best Hardware Startup
Lit Motors
Lockitron
Makerbot
Nest
Raspberry Pi

Best Time Sink
Angry Birds Star Wars
Buzzfeed
Letterpress
Pinterest
WhatsApp

Biggest Social Impact
Donors Choose
Indiegogo
Kickstarter
Kiva
Reddit

Angel of the Year
Michael Arrington
Chris Dixon
Paul Graham
David Lee
Chris Sacca

VC of the Year
Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz
Matt Cohler
Jim Goetz
Michael Moritz
Peter Thiel

Founder of the Year
Nathan Blecharczyk, Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia (Airbnb)
Kevin and Julia Hartz (Eventbrite)
Elon Musk (SpaceX, Tesla)
Kevin Systrom (Instagram)
Nir Zuk (Palo Alto Networks)

CEO of the Year
Dick Costolo (Twitter)
Phil Libin (Evernote)
Marissa Mayer (Yahoo!)
Larry Page (Google)
Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)

Best New Startup of 2012
Coursera
Crowdtilt
Lyft
Snapchat
Waze

Best Overall Startup of 2012
Fab
Github
Instagram
Palantir
Square

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• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
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• Flash analysis: future opportunities for Pinterest

After two years of trying to figure out what OpenFlow was and how it might change networking for the better, 2012 was when the promise of OpenFlow morphed into software-defined networking, which was later co-opted into network virtualization. Things are still heating up, but let’s look at where we’ve been.

Guido Appenzeller (left) and Kyle Forster of Big Switch

This was the concept of SDN. Under that title, the physical hardware of a network was abstracted from the virtual machines and applications running on the network. Sometimes OpenFlow might have a hand in this and sometimes it won’t.

Instead of commodifying the router, these companies added a layer of software between the networking gear and the application, generally known as the controller. Some of these were open source, some provided APIs for the accessing the underlying networking gear and some did not. The point in SDN was that once you had this virtualization, it became possible to link your network to your application. Depending on whose controller you used, this process was easier or more difficult.

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

With that framework in mind, here are the notable deals in the networking world in 2012.

Oracle buys Xsigo: This deal, which was announced in July, wasn’t really an SDN deal. Xsigo has really tried to grab ahold of the SDN banner with its marketing, but it was about the virtualization at the hardware and port layer. Xsigo’s hardware (plus fabric) make it possible to plug storage and networking cables into a Xsigo box and then allocate those physical resources without a network engineer having to get involved. Oracle buying Xsigo fits with its proprietary hardware plans and less with any sort of Oracle SDN play.

Nicira’s CTO Martin Casado

Brocade buys Vyatta: Vyatta is another company that tried to give itself an SDN facelift. In this case, Brocade, the company better known for making switching hardware took the bait (or was simply merciful), and said it would buy Vyatta while the company was making the rounds trying to raise another round of venture capital. Brocade can use Vyatta’s networking software to move up the stack and possibly provide a more modular approach to SDN that allows customers to piece together Broacde’s hardware and software if they so choose (but they won’t have to choose both as they might in a Cisco or Arista decision).

Cisco to buy Cariden for $141 million: In November, Cisco purchased a network mapping and optimization company that has recently adopted some SDN features (and marketing). For Cisco, buying Cariden made sense because it delivered the type of controlled network virtualization ecosystem that posed no danger to Cisco’s router business, but allowed Cisco to sell SDN services and applications to its service provider customers. Meanwhile, Cisco this year also announced its own controller layer and an API to let applications talk to it (but not the underlying Cisco gear.)

Juniper to buy Contrail for $176 million: Finally, last week Juniper said it is buying Contrail, a startup in the SDN space that had only launched a day or two prior to the acquisition announcement. The deal came just a few months after Contrail had received $10 million in funding from Khosla Ventures, with Juniper participating as a strategic investor. Contrail’s technology centers around rethinking where the controller would sit in a virtualized network and how those pieces work together. It had a great team and good-sounding tech, but few real customers.

The year isn’t over and it’s possible one of the myriad networking startups funded this year, such as Big Switch, Pluribus Networks, Pica8, Plexxi and/or Cyan might end up getting bought before we close the books on 2012. But even if that doesn’t happen, I’m comfortable saying this is the clearly the year SDN has sold out and networking has really broken out.

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• The promise of SDNs in the enterprise
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• The promise of software-defined networking

These giants are deconstructing the server, rethinking the data center and building new databases. And they are also rethinking how they build out networks. To that end several companies have latched onto the concept of software defined networks to help build an abstracted and programmable layer on top of the physical networking gear. This gives systems administrators more flexibility, but it doesn’t help with another problem that many data center providers face, creating faster equipment that can carry their escalating traffic.

This is where Plexxi, a Cambridge, Mass.-based startup sees its opportunity. It has built what it calls a switch, but is actually an entirely new type of networking gear aimed at delivering a lot of traffic between racks of servers as fast as possible. Plexxi also offers Plexxi Control, management software that runs on commodity hardware and routes traffic around the network. Inside the Plexxi “switch” are optical components normally found inside telecom gear. Plexxi has designed the first networking gear for the data center that uses optics instead of electronics to solve the networking bottleneck.

Each switch has 32 10-gigabit-Ethernet capable ports and can be connected to other Plexxi switches. For now the company has tested deployments of its gear supporting 10,000 servers, but Plexxi CEO and CTO Dave Husak assures me it can scale bigger. It will have to. For example, Facebook, a potential customer, is estimated to have more than 150,000 servers. The Plexxi gear allows for the network to become essentially flat — a rack of servers talk to the box and the boxes have the speed and capability to talk directly to each other. Instead of hierarchies or trees — software running on the switch tracks where virtual instances have moved and routes traffic to them over this single layer. This speeds up the networking and simplifies the gear supporting the network.

Plexxi has done something unique in its box worth looking at. It has replaced the traditional electronics networking with optics, which boosts speed but also reduces costs and power draw. To keep costs in line it buys off-the-shelf components and strips them down to the essentials. While the transceivers and equipment inside telecom networks cost thousands of dollars, Plexxi’s entire box sells for $64,000 in part because it did away with things like line cards and amplifiers that telcos use to boost the distance an optical signal can travel.

Using optics inside the boxes and connecting the boxes directly together in a flat network also eliminates a lot of cabling and additional electronics that both add costs and increase the power consumption. Husak told me the Plexxi switch draws milliwatts per port. The latest switch from Arista draws 5 watts per port.

Husak is a veteran on the networking world, remembering how the switch replaced token ring and other networking architectures in the 90s. Now, twenty-some odd years after the first switch was unveiled, Plexxi is poised to remake networks again with an entirely new systems architecture and design. It has almost $50 million in funding and has been building this switch out since 2010. This is a company unafraid of taking on Arista, Cisco and other giants in networking in a quest to re-imagine the data center of the future.

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• Infrastructure Q3: OpenStack and flash step into the spotlight
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• The promise of SDNs in the enterprise

In the data center, the flood of information traveling across networks has changed in three ways. First, there is more of it. Second, the data is related to other servers inside the data center as opposed to getting a request for data and then serving it up. This is the so-called East-West traffic explosion. Instead of a server sending information up to a switch that sends it out of the data center, the server is now sending requests to a switch that then connects to other intra-data-center servers. Thus one request can now involve a few switches and several servers sending traffic back and forth across the network before it ever leaves the data center.

The third change is that cost pressures and the need to scale are pushing data center operators to flatten out the network so more servers (or virtual machines) talk to the switch. The solution here so far appears to be a networking fabric, but may in time graduate to a truly distributed and virtualized network.

The net result of these changes is that network pipes need to be fatter while the network processors need to be faster. But because this is also a data center, the components that enable this have to be relatively cheap. This is where Kotura comes in. The startup, based in Monterrey Park, Calif., offers a fiber-based transceiver that can deliver 100 gigabits per second inside the data center. The transceiver could live on a board next to the CPU or inside a switch and could eventually expand to deliver a terabit per second (Tbps).

While one 1 Tbps is crazy fast when you consider that many data centers are currently upgrading to 10 gigabit Ethernet between servers, it’s going to be necessary. Arlon Martin, VP of Marketing, Government Contracts & Industry Relations at Kotura, tells me that customers are building products for the high-performance computing sectors but also for real-time data processing. The goal is bringing a low-power and less expensive optical part into a rack of servers, able to scale up to terabit per second capacities.

If you have a rack of servers with even multiple 10 GigE ports, suddenly the top-of-rack switch, or whatever fabric is stitching those servers together needs to have a lot of bandwidth. This is something Cisco has noticed, which is why it purchased Lightwire earlier this year. Kotura provides it, and because its chip stuffs 25 Gbps into a single wavelength in a strand of fiber with up to 40 available wavelengths customers can light up the remaining wavelengths as needed to reach up to a terabit of capacity.

Some other silicon photonics vendors require more chips or line cards to upgrade, which means new equipment. Much like Plexxi, which is bringing fiber-based gear to the data center, Kotura is betting that scaled-out networks have a need for speed (and capacity) that only fiber can provide. However, Plexxi wouldn’t compete with Kotura, but would likely buy a chip from it (or another transceiver vendor) to power its gear.

Kotura has 75 employees and has raised undisclosed millions from ARCH Venture Partners, Fuse Capital, GF Private Equity and others. It has an established customer base in the telecommunications business where it has sold product since 2006. But now it’s moving into the data center in the hopes of solving looming problems in the networking sector with cheaper, low-power optical chips that can deliver a lot of capacity between servers. The new data center is going to have a lot of dense computing, low-cost fast storage, and soon, high-capacity low-latency networks connecting everything.

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• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
• What Enterprise Software Vendors Could Learn from the Consumer Space
• How to manage big data without breaking the bank

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• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
• Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight
• Infrastructure Q2: Big data and PaaS gain more momentum

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• Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight
• Infrastructure Q2: Big data and PaaS gain more momentum
• Infrastructure Overview, Q2 2010

Plexxi has been around since 2010 and has raised $28 million from North Bridge Venture Partners, Matrix Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners in that time to build some secret switch that uses fiber optics instead of the current Ethernet connections. In a conversation last week, Plexxi’s Mat Mathews, VP of product management, explained (to a certain extent) what the stealthy company has been up to and how it views the worlds of software-defined networks, massively scalable data centers and next-generation networks.

Like many, Plexxi is addressing the networking market, specifically the idea that the next generation of networking has to have a flat architecture and adapt to the needs of applications on demand. However, unlike the companies that view the problem as one requiring OpenFlow or a software-defined network that can work on commodity networking gear, Plexxi wants to sell a smarter box. In this way it’s closer to the Ciscos and Junipers of the world.

Plexxi is selling a top-of-rack switch that contains both fabric-like management software as well as a fiber-optics component that can transmit packets faster than the current 10 GigE ports. For those who follow the fiber world, such a statement may seem a bit insane. Fiber is not cheap and the biggest reason it’s not used in data centers is because it can cost ten to 100 times more than current Ethernet technologies.

But Matthews says that Plexxi has made fiber optics cost-equivalent to 10 Gigabit Ethernet by doing away with high-cost considerations such as transmitting wavelengths over long distances or ensuring the fiber lasts for decades as opposed to a few years. Basically, if a telecommunications network’s undersea fiber transport requires Chanel, Plexxi wants to deliver data-center optics at H&M prices. And that is the technological breakthrough for Plexxi.

But it’s also trying to build a truly flat network by offering software that takes advantage of the fiber to deliver networking capacity to applications on demand. Each Plexxi switch talks to another Plexxi switch and there are no hierarchies. The switch has the fiber optics, controller software and the fabric. Mathews didn’t want to get into too much detail on the switch design and the software, as the product won’t be generally available until next year, so it’s all a bit hazy and hopeful for now.

Still, as someone who talks to a lot of vendors in the networking world, Plexxi does have something compelling. Fiber in the data center could deliver speed and capacity that is unrivaled, and while it’s unclear how it would work with equipment or software from other vendors, it’s worth waiting to see what it can deliver.

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• The promise of SDNs in the enterprise
• Takeaways from the second quarter in cloud and data
• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond

Here are Goldstein’s Top 10 Phat Startups in no particular order. (Full disclosure: five of the 10 are North Bridge affiliated companies and they’ve been designated with NBVP.)

1. Heartland Robotics: iRobot and MIT alum Rodney Brooks’ Heartland Robotics is making robots flexible and cheap enough to do manual tasks that most people don’t want to do. Boston-based Heartland’s success in building “teachable” robots could mean that repetitive jobs that might otherwise go to China stay put.

2. Foro Energy: Littleton, Colo.-based Foro develops drills for oil exploration that use high-powered lasers to do the job faster and cleaner. The company says its  technology will enable oil companies to drill ten times faster than traditional drill bits. (NBVP)

3. Kurion: Kurion attacks the tricky problem of remediating nuclear waste. It’s take is to encapsulate the by-products in glass which can then be buried and stored for hundreds of years more safely. Kurion technology, which GigaOM’s Katie Fehrenbacher once called the most successful greentech startup you’ve never heard of,  has been used extensively in the cleanup from the Fukushima disaster.

4. Actifio:  Most big companies store way more copies (15 to 100 of them) of their data than they could possibly need. That’s because their various systems don’t know what copies are being held by other systems. Actifio’s plan is to enable those companies to keep and manage one copy of all that stuff. Actifio is based in Waltham, Mass. (NBVP)

5. Sand 9: Cambridge, Mass.-based Sand 9 makes cell phone components that enable them to scan many frequencies to cover their LTE, 3G, GSM, WiFi bases. Boston University spin-off Sand 9 builds MEMS-based resonators to accomplish that goal. It’s crazy to have to build eight different RF chains for each band there’s a real need for flexible components to cover that range, Goldstein said.

6. DataXu:  This company uses “rocket science” (seriously) to perform real-time analysis of how effective spending on advertising — online, mobile and video — is. Co-founder and CTO Bill Simmons developed the core technology at MIT while he was earning his Ph.D. in aeronautics and astronautics.  (He helped develop and test the real-time flight software that handled guidance and navigation for the Atlas rocket program.)

7. CompassEOS: Startup CompassEOS, (aka Compass Electro Optical Systems), based in Netanya, Israel, is still in stealth mode but Goldstein said it uses an electro-optical interconnect to produce what will be a next-generation router that he said will be smaller faster, cheaper and more energy efficient than the current state of the art.  (NBVP)

8. CoolPlanet Energy Systems: This sounds to good to be true. CoolPlanet‘s technology claims to produce “carbon negative” gas” out of biomass. As GigaOM reported last December, it has some pretty potent backers in BP, GE, Google and ConocoPhillips. The Camarillo, Calif. company builds tractor-trailer sized machines, that are clustered around biomass sources — farms, forests. They ingest corncobs, woodchips, whatever biomass is available, and spit out gasoline. (NBVP)

9. Makani Power: Makani creates airborne wings that it says can generate power much less expensively than traditional wind turbines. The company’s “tethered wings” can be deployed at high altitudes over land or sea, wherever wind is stronger and more consistant, according to the Makani website. Wing design eliminates 90 percent of the material used in conventional wind turbines.

10. Plexxi: Still in stealth mode, Cambridge-Mass.-based Plexxi isn’t saying much about what it’s doing other than it has to do with revamping data center networks to make them more flexible. Goldstein said the goal is to “make traditional 3-tier networking architectures obsolete.” The company is just now kicking off a road show so stay tuned. (NBVP)

Goldstein is not the first to call for more, um, gravitas from startups, but it’s good to be reminded that startups can — and should — attack the big problems.

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• How to Make Cloud Computing Greener
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