Sun still gets it

As I've said here before, Sun gets the commodity hardware game. Today they announced a major alliance with Intel to support Solaris on Intel commodity compute hardware. While Sun positioned this as a way to augment their proprietary Sparc processor hardware, the writing is clearly on the wall at Sun and they know they need to embrace commodity compute instead of letting the Sparc processor boat anchor sink the ship. It's hard to hoist the anchor when you're underway, but they are trying....

So, remind me again - if the enterprise can use commodity compute from Intel for enterprise applications, databases, operating systems, middleware and so on (all of which are complicated and can be compute intensive), then why does this same commodity compute not work for packet processing and routing/forwarding table management?

The answer is here in front of our eyes - open source Linux leveraging commodity compute for the enterprise has been sailing forward for over ten years and is now commonplace. Now, it's time for the networking community to leverage commodity compute - time to get on board as the anchor is up and we're sailing toward the future!

The Startup Energy is Contagious

I was recently talking to a friend of mine who has been running a startup for about 6 months now. He's made his money and honestly does not need to work anymore. When I asked him how things were going (and his startup is doing great) he said, "You know, I was not sure I really wanted to do this again, but here I am and I am LOVING this!" I could feel his energy and love for his job and company reverberate through the cellular network into my ear. I'm still smiling thinking about it.

And that is the marvelous thing about a startup that is going well - the energy is absolutely contagious (granted, when things don't go well there can be a black vortex of mind-numbing pain, but we'll skip that part for now :) The day after the aforementioned phone call I was working over at Vyatta and revelled in some more positive startup energy. A few things I noticed:

• Nearly every desk was busy with work and multiple projects
• OFRs were everywhere - racks in cubes for testing, PCs laying on tables ready for shipment, etc.
• The round table that was for the breakroom is now someones desk in the lobby area - needless to say, all cubes are taken.
• Signs of expansion (sales, engineers, labs, etc) are everywhere

While the above is some what quantitative, qualitatively there is a lot of energy in the air. Everyone is very busy but happy. Now, the power of positive energy does not usually sell networking products and we still have a lot of work to do, but I think we're definitely headed in the right direction with the right energy surrounding us.

As a testament to that, I have to give a hat tip to our financial wizard at the company, John. After visiting the company last Friday, I went home and then realized on Saturday morning that my Blackberry was missing. For those of you who know me, that is not a huge crisis given how I feel about that device, but still I am not one for losing things. I scoured my house and car and could not figure out where the Crapberry (couldn't help myself :) had gone. I happened to be out doing errands yesterday (Sunday) afternoon in the vicinity of Vyatta and figured I'd drive by and see if somehow I had left it there on Friday. As I drove up to the building I saw lights on and discovered John in his cube working away. Unlike others in the company that can often work remotely, John often needs to be in the office to do his work because of the paperwork involved. John let me in and luckily (!?) I found my Crapberry. It was about 5:30pm and I asked John how long he had been in the office. With a chuckle and big smile on his face he said he had gotten there around 8am that morning as "there is a lot going on - see what you created?" So, hat tip to you John - your startup energy is contagious!