Vblogatta

Cross-post: Gigaom - It's Cloudy, But When Will It Rain?

2009-11-01T12:17:00.000-08:00

I've been doing some thinking about when the cloud computing market will start to see some venture exits. While nascent markets are very hard to predict, I took a stab at a qualified prediction in this latest post on Gigaom. Comments are always welcome!

Cross-post: Gigaom - Not Everything is a Cloud

2009-09-24T14:47:00.000-07:00

I have posted some thoughts on the overhyped term "cloud computing" and the areas in this market for VC investments at Gigaom. You can read my post here. Comments always welcome!

Cross-post: Gigaom - Do Enterpirses Need a Toll Road to the Cloud?

2009-08-14T17:27:00.000-07:00

My latest musings on the enterprise IT adoption (or lack there of) and requirements for cloud computing is now live on Gigaom. In this post I postulate the need for a CloudNAP to connect enterprises to the cloud. Comments always welcome!

Cross-post: GigaOm - Why Cisco Should Buy Dell

2009-07-24T00:13:00.000-07:00

My latest post for GigaOm - could Dell be Cisco's next acquisition? To me, this makes sense for both the enterprise IT and consumer markets. You can read the entire post here. Comments always welcome!

Cross-post - GigaOm: The Hidden Cost of the Cloud: Bandwidth Charges

2009-07-17T20:28:00.000-07:00

After a longer than expected break, I've posted a new blog for GigaOm on the costs of cloud computing and bandwidth charges. You can read the post here. Comments always welcome!

Cross-post: GigaOm - How HP Can Fight Cisco and Win

2009-02-07T11:25:00.000-08:00

I'm off stirring the pot again on GigaOm.... This time I wrote a blog about the startups that HP should buy to compete with Cisco. Cisco has moved into servers and I am sure that has angered HP - that is their core enterprise IT market focus. You can read my full post here.

Cross-post: GigaOm - Should Canada Bail Out Nortel?

2009-02-05T10:33:00.000-08:00

I wrote this post for GigaOm this morning - I was inspired by a conversation I had the other night with a Canadian startup CEO that was outraged by his government funding a bail out of Nortel.

Cross-post: GigaOm - Microsoft Reveals 4th Gen Datacenters

2008-12-03T14:43:00.000-08:00

Microsoft revealed details of their vision for the future of datacenter architecture for cloud computing. I wrote a short piece for GigaOm here on the topic.

Open Source Routers in Amsterdam

2008-11-27T07:17:00.000-08:00

A few years back before I was a venture capitalist I used to hang around in data centers across the globe. One of my favorite locations to visit was Amsterdam because there were data centers close to both the free-spirited and bohemian city and Schipol Airport (which I was was told is literally pronounced "ship-hole" because the airport is on the site of a buried ship - please tell me if I've come to believe some urban myth here :). That is why this blog post by Peter Judge brought back some good memories - and highlighted another Vyatta success story.

Cross-post: GigaOm: Trailer Park 2.0 - Where All Your Data Lives

2008-11-26T20:26:00.000-08:00

I wrote a post today for GigaOm on a potential next generation metropolitan data center solution. It was a fun post to write and I even got to mention The Jerry Springer Show. You can read the full post here.

Catching up on a few posts

2008-10-28T10:19:00.000-07:00

I've continued to be busy writing for GigaOm.... Here is a post on why I think now is the time for startups to take VC money. I've also done a post on the very real possibility that Cisco will buy EMC and on the enterprise migration to cloud computing with something I am calling the "Cloud Two-Step". Comments and thoughts always welcome!

Cross-post: GigaOm - Cisco to support VMware?

2008-09-12T16:07:00.000-07:00

I have been hearing a rumor about Cisco announcing support for VMware virtual machines next week at their VMworld conference. I wrote about this today for Om here - could be a very interesting development in the networking market.

Cross-post: GigaOM: Coming Soon, PC as a Service over Broadband

2008-08-31T08:30:00.000-07:00

As service providers look for ways to monetize their pipes and become more than just plumbers who charge by the hour (or byte) it looks like they are seriously considering providing virtualized PCs over broadband in the near future. I wrote about this trend for Om here. Comments always welcome!

BusinessWeek!

2008-08-04T07:43:00.001-07:00

My latest post for GigaOm just got picked up and syndicated by BusinessWeek. I guess the term "cloud computing" has made it to the mainstream business press....

Cross-post: GigaOm: It's 2018 - Who Owns the Cloud?

2008-08-01T07:59:00.000-07:00

Like many of my VC brethren, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about cloud computing. My latest post on this from GigaOm is here. Of course, I predict all clouds will be running Vyatta :)

Cross-post: GigaOm - Why Metered Broadband Is Bad for Microsoft, Google & Us

2008-07-17T14:17:00.000-07:00

Usage-based pricing for the Internet appears to be headed our way and I think this will dramatically change consumer behavior. This could have serious implications for cloud computing and other content-driven business models. I wrote about this for Om here. Comments always welcome!

Intel Compute Power Just Increased 1000X

2008-07-14T11:48:00.000-07:00

Earlier this month Intel began messaging to software developers to prepare for compute processors with "thousands of cores." I think the implication of this much compute power on the horizon will have dramatic affects on the development of dedicated ASICs for a wealth of applications. For networking products, like those from Vyatta, the implications are huge - imagine a core (or ten) per process doing VPN termination, encryption, anti-virus analysis, intrusion detection and so on. I wrote a bit about this for Om awhile back - this post might be worth revisiting for a refresher.

Cross-post - Gigaom: Data Centers Caught in a Cool FLIRy

2008-06-20T11:53:00.000-07:00

I wrote a post today for Gigaom about an interesting technique to help identify data center cooling issues using FLIR thermography. You can read the post here - comments always welcome!

Cross-post: GigaOm - The Quest for Reliability on the Internet

2008-05-20T17:42:00.000-07:00

I spent some time talking to some Internet operations friends of mine today and thinking about reliability and uptime measurements. This post on GigaOm was the result. Comments always welcome!

Startup of the Week

2008-05-10T13:13:00.000-07:00

Very cool - Vyatta is named Startup of the Week by Information Week!

Cross-post: GigaOm - Web2.0, Please Meet Your Host, the Internet

2008-05-07T06:31:00.000-07:00

Router-huggers unite, here's a post for you.... :)

Cross-post: GigaOm - Inexpensive, Powerful and Blindingly Fast

2008-05-01T09:20:00.000-07:00

Intel enters the 10GigE adapter market in an aggressive way. Look out below - 10 Gig Ethernet is now a commodity. You can read my post on this here.

Cross-post: GigaOm - Interop Vegas, Land of the Inexpensive and Powerful

2008-04-30T13:31:00.001-07:00

A pervasive theme at Interop this year is using inexpensive and powerful hardware for networking. Hard for me to argue there! You can read the post over at GigaOm here.

Cross-post: GigaOm - Wanted: Virtualization Engineer, Referee Exp. Pref.

2008-04-17T14:05:00.000-07:00

Is it time for a virtualization engineer? Here are my thoughts on this topic, posted over at GigaOm.

Argentina goes Open!

2008-04-17T13:57:00.000-07:00

Interesting news from Ostatic that Argentina may be the first country to regulate that all government offices use open source. For those that know me well, you know that my godson is from Buenos Aires and that I've spent my fair share of time crossing 9 de Julio. I have lots of good memories of BA and this news just reaffirms my desire to spend more time in this great country eating milanesas and alfajores de Havanna.

Cross-post: GigaOm on The Music Industry

2008-04-02T06:56:00.000-07:00

Nothing gets me revved up faster than a double shot of espresso than more the stupidity of the music business. You can read my latest rant on this topic over at GigaOm. You really don't want to see me after the espresso :)

Cross-post on ostatic with quote from Kelly Herrell

2008-03-25T14:58:00.000-07:00

Kelly Herrell is famous for some great quotes around the workplace. I took one of these and turned it into a blog post on ostatic that you can read here.

Cross-post - GigaOm: Coming Soon - the Cisco Blade Server?

2008-03-21T17:01:00.000-07:00

I wrote a blog post this week on the possibility of Cisco moving into the enterprise data center by offering blade servers for their new Nexus 7000 switch. I think this move is inevitable given that Cisco, IBM, HP, Microsoft, VMware and others are fighting for account control in the enterprise data center. You can read my post here.

Cross-post: GigaOm: Save Music - Disconnect the Internet!

2008-03-20T11:22:00.000-07:00

This topic has never failed to raise my blood pressure and get me worked up.... Why again should ISPs be responsible for people breaking the law using their infrastructure? Read my latest post on this topic here and get ready for some dripping sarcasm.

NASA and open source

2008-03-11T08:14:00.000-07:00

It looks like open source is going where few people have gone before - to space, the final frontier. Coverage of NASA's use of Fedora and RHEL starts here on the ostatic blog. I can already picture the Vyatta system routing packets between planets, something that has been on the minds of networking geeks for over 8 years.

US recession would help open source

2008-03-07T15:45:00.004-08:00

According to Sun, FOSS will be helped by the US recession. I guess there is always a silver lining! Read about the good part of the US recession here.

No wonder I like Europe so much....

2008-03-07T06:17:00.000-08:00

The EU has announced that it will consider buying more open-source software. While this is clearly another gnarl at Microsoft, it also bodes well for EU business practices and economics. You can read some thoughts on this announcements over at Ostatic as well. Ah, how I look forward to Paris in the spring time - browsing the web with Firefox running on Fedora and connected to the Internet with Vyatta routers.

Cross-post on Ostatic

2008-03-04T14:45:00.000-08:00

Om asked me to help christen his latest addition to the GigaOm network, the Ostatic blog with a post on open source telecom. That seemed right up my alley.... You can read my post here. In case you are wondering - I know I was - Ostatic is destined to be slang for "ecstatic with open source." That works for me!

GigaOm: ISPs or Bobbies?

2008-02-12T12:30:00.000-08:00

Insanity around policing the Internet continues. The UK is considering legislation that will force ISPs to disconnect users if they are suspected of downloading pirated music or video. I thought theft was handled by police? Read my post on this topic here.

A decade of open source

2008-02-08T10:57:00.001-08:00

Here's a great post by Bruce Perens about the first decade of open source. As entrenched open source is throughout IT infrastructure, it's easy to forget this movement is only ten years old.

Cross-post: GigaOm on Insecure Borders

2008-02-07T16:08:00.000-08:00

I read an article today that really bothered me about the US government performing searches on digital media when entering the country. I wrote a short blog about this for Om that you can read here. I guess when you bring a Vyatta system into the US you may have to boot it up and execute a "show config" command?!?

GigaOm: The IPv6 Revolution is Nigh

2008-02-05T16:20:00.000-08:00

Here's a post that I wrote on how we're getting closer and closer to IPv6 being deployed globally. Another chink in the chain fell into place this week with the root-level domain name servers returning IPv4 and IPv6 addresses instead of only IPv4 addresses. Read more of my post here.

Open source up 26% in the enterprise

2008-02-01T13:02:00.000-08:00

Open source in the enterprise is on the rise and up 26% - it's only a matter of time people, only a matter of time....

Publicly Slamming U2

2008-01-30T12:47:00.001-08:00

Here's a post I wrote for Om where I have publicly slammed my favorite rock band of all time (well, their manager). Bono please forgive me, but something had to be said on this issue.

Open source spaceship

2008-01-23T13:25:00.000-08:00

Virgin Galactic revealed plans for SpaceShipTwo with an open architecture today. From the press that I read, it looks like Virgin Galactic will be more of a user of open source than an open source company. Still, the words "open source" next to the word "spaceship" is pretty cool Yes, I think the open source model has evolved. If it is good enough for rocket science, it is surely good enough for data networks!

My year without the Broncos - the review

2008-01-21T17:49:00.000-08:00

So, it is 2008 and the Denver Broncos finished last season in miserable form. I honestly don't know their final win-loss record off the top of my head and it's been decades since that was true in January. I did manage to hold true to my oath not to watch the Broncos in 2007 and I'm really not worse for the wear. 2007 was a good year but I suspect I'll ruin 2008 following my favorite team to another disappointing season. Baseball anyone? :)

Cross-post: GigaOm on Collaboration Tools

2008-01-21T17:47:00.000-08:00

Here's a post I did for Om on my current quest for new collaboration tools for our advisors at Panorama Capital. As always, please let me know your comments and suggestions.

Cross-post - GigaOm: How to Safeguard Your Privacy Online

2007-12-27T07:48:00.000-08:00

I'm been fascinated by the constant drum of media around privacy issues on the Internet and how people are surprised when their privacy has been compromised. I absolutely believe that everything you send on-line is being tracked and monitored (and I'm not too paranoid :) and wrote about some things you can do to help you try to keep some of your privacy and leave less of a digital footprint for Om.

Cross-post: GigaOm - In Search of the Über Set-top Box

2007-12-19T11:45:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking a lot about video on the Internet these days given our recent investment in GridNetworks. That got me thinking about set-top boxes and I wrote this post for Om. Comments and suggestions always welcome!

Breaking out of the Cisco mold

2007-12-05T14:08:00.000-08:00

I came across a great article by Network World today on why it makes sense to break away from Cisco as your single networking vendor for your organization. To be fair, this article was a counterpoint to an argument on why having a single vendor and a single throat to choke is a good thing. The point of the article that I found very interesting was that while Cisco is a single company, their product line is complex and filled with many reliability impacting software features that most people never touch. This impacts MTTR and means that the claim that a single vendor provides better reliability is not relevant and fairly hollow. You can read the full article here.

As some of the comments on the article point out, quality support from your networking vendor is of paramount importance. We here at Vyatta agree and think our customers say it best.

Broncos on MNF again

2007-11-19T11:42:00.000-08:00

I just found out that the Broncos are on Monday Night Football tonight. I'm really going to try to not torture myself like last time. Repeat after me three times: "I will not watch the Broncos lose again on Monday Night. I will not watch the Broncos lose again on Monday Night. I will not watch the Broncos lose again on Monday Night." Wish me luck on avoiding inevitable pain and sorrow....

UPDATE: I just read this morning that the Broncos actually won. Repeat after me: "A single win does not equal a winning streak. A single win does not equal a winning streak. A single win does not equal a winning streak."

Cross-post: GigaOm - The Time Has Come for IPv6

2007-11-07T06:16:00.000-08:00

Here's a post I wrote for Om on the upcoming transition that may finally be upon us - it's time to learn IPv6. Really, we mean it this time. :) You can read the post here.

I may be paranoid, but how did MSFT know?

2007-11-04T13:47:00.000-08:00

I was having some challenges this past weekend on my home desktop PC running Windows XP. I was getting the dreaded hang at the Windows Splash screen (the where the flag logo shows up and the green bars scroll along the bottom of the screen) that I could not solve. Nothing had changed on my machine and I had tried all sorts of options to get my system back running based on some research I did on the Net: ran chkdsk multiple times, tried multiple different restore points, booted into safe mode, checked msconfig options and so forth. Let's just say that I spent a number of hours working on the issue to no avail and I was more than a bit frustrated.

In a last ditch effort, I was doing one last chkdsk and booting off my Windows Recovery Disk into safe mode. While the chkdsk was running (about a 3 hour process) I finally decided to take the advice of my friend Om to "get a mac." For those that know me, I used to be violently anti-Mac based on a horrific experience in the early 90s with a AppleBook that I was forced to use that continually gave me a bomb message with "Sorry a system error occurred." But, I've grown older and maybe wiser to look beyond the past. So, while my PC was running chkdsk for the third time I decided to boot my laptop and surf www.apple.com to check out the options on the iMac and MacBook Pro. I must admit they look very cool!

And just as I was checking prices, I swear, my PC completed the chkdsk and rebooted perfectly. It was up and running, no issues to be found. For fun, I rebooted it twice and it came back up perfectly (I still have no idea what the issue was or how I solved it).

So, I may be paranoid, but if AT&T was watching my web browsing and sent that information over to Microsoft, did an automated process kick in and fix my PC to avoid me becoming an Apple convert? Of course, if that was really the case, I would like to think that Microsoft would have solved the problem on my PC before I reached the frustration point of pricing a Mac. But, I wonder....

Seriously - why do I do this to myself?

2007-10-30T09:22:00.000-07:00

If you read this blog you know I have sworn off the Denver Broncos in 2007. I was doing good with my fasting - I had not watched a single minute of any of their games nor did I even know where they stood in the standings. But, when they played last night on Monday Night Football, it was hard to resist settling in to watch them play. I mean come on - a re-match of Elway's SuperBowl victory over Favre and the Packers?!? What football fan could resist?

But, I did resist. I did not listen to the game on the way home from work on ESPN. I did not come home early to watch the game and I declined a few invitations to go to a local bar and watch the game with friends. I was feeling good about my abstinence.

I came home, did some errands, ate some dinner and did some work. I was doing just fine.... And then, I decided to sit down and relax in front of the tube. The tube came on to ESPN and I saw the score: Denver 13, Green Bay 13, start of overtime. I actually said aloud, "Well, this may be worth watching!" I felt a little guilty for breaking my promise, but seriously, what could it hurt?

And then came the shock therapy. Denver kicks off and on the first play from scrimmage Favre throws an 82-yard touchdown pass (I think it was some sort of Monday Night Football record) to end the game. In literally 16 seconds of my time spent watching the game it was over. At least I did not waste 4 hours watching the Denver Donkeys - I got the same treatment in an efficient 16 seconds.

Cross-post: GigaOm - How Network Statistics Can Make Search Better And More Relevant

2007-10-28T19:29:00.000-07:00

Here's another cross-post on a piece I wrote for Om on using network traffic statistics to produce more relevant search results. This post was inspired by an excellent paper by Joe Weinman of AT&T that you can find here. I really thought this post would spark some major concerns over privacy, but since it did not I guess everyone knows that whatever you do on the Internet (email, IM, VoIP, web browsing, etc.) is public knowledge.

The Day the Routers Died...

2007-10-27T19:48:00.000-07:00

If you have not seen this video from the RIPE 55 Meeting last week in Amsterdam at the Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky (great place - been there a few times) then you're missing out. Classic networking geek video - try to see how many of the technical references you can catch.

My favorite verse: "And now we've all lost our purpose.. my cisco shares completely worthless..." Enjoy!

Cross-post: NewTeeVee post on infinite bandwidth

2007-10-10T23:09:00.000-07:00

Today NewTeeVee (part of the GigaOm network) posted a blog I wrote about how the Internet would change if bandwidth was infinite. It's good that I have a fairly thick skin as some of the comments on the post were less than constructive - and it got even worse on digg.

If you're up for joining the fray, I'd welcome your comments and thoughts on the topic!

The Guardian: Ignoring open source is costing us dear

2007-09-20T07:17:00.000-07:00

I found a great article in the Guardian today by Victor Keegan about how ignoring open source software (mainly Linux and Firefox) is costing the UK significant amount of revenues. What I found most interesting is that the author found a prevailing attitude toward open source as "anything that is free can't be any good." If the UK is getting ready to save some money with Linux and Firefox, wait until they realize that they can reduce their networking costs too using Vyatta! You can read the full article here.

Cross-posts on data centers over at GigaOm

2007-09-17T22:44:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking a lot about the future of data centers and the relevant systems and network architectures. Not following the Broncos has given me some free time on Sundays :)

Om posted my piece on the current revolution for data center architectures last week - it sure does look like we're headed back to the future. It's clear to me that virtualization is going to play a key role in the data center of the future and that looks vaguely familiar to network architectures of the past. You can read the post here.

I have also been very interested in making data centers more eco-friendly and wrote about this over at Earth2Tech (a GigaOm site) here. If you're a fan of Vyatta, then you know our software runs on servers that are Energy Star certified already!

P.S. Yes, I do know the Broncos are 2-0. I have not watched a minute of them in 2007 yet :)

Cross post - CSCO vs MSFT on GigaOm

2007-09-03T16:17:00.000-07:00

I've just posted a new piece I've written on GigaOm on CSCO vs MSFT that is found here. As you can tell, those of us involved with Vyatta are watching Cisco from multiple angles! :)

Please let me know your thoughts!

My Year without the Denver Broncos

2007-08-14T08:08:00.000-07:00

I will not be a fan of the Denver Broncos in 2007. There, I've said it....

Many of you know that I grew up in the Denver area and have been a rabid Denver Broncos fan for over 20 years. I was there for Morton to Moses, Norris Weese, Randy Gradishar, the strike year, the bad and then great Elway years, the championship games against the Browns, the Mile High Salute and Jake the Snake. When I moved out to the SF Bay Area I was still a Broncos fan, against the rabid and ridiculous tide of the 49ers (or 40-whiners) fans. I was still there after the 55-10 SuperBowl debacle - and I survived in the heart of the 40-whiners territory.

Although, I must admit over the past few years I have not committed myself as much as I had in the past to the team as both work and home kept me busy on the weekends. And, of course, I can't watch every game here as I used to back in Colorado. That being said, every week I would scan the game listings and see if by some luck of the draw the Broncos would be a nationally televised game or even on Sunday or Monday night and then attempt to plan my weekend accordingly. Even if I could not watch the game, I checked the score via the web nearly hourly.

For the Broncos, 2005 was a great vintage. They went 13-3 and had a good shot at the SuperBowl but lost to the Steelers in the AFC Championship game. And then came 2006.... I was set for another great season and hoped the team would go further than in 2006. Things started off great, but faded into the second half. Even that seemed fine to me, I've been through tough seasons as a fan before and I could endure this one too.

Until the last game of the season. The Broncos simply had to beat the hapless 40-whiners at home in Denver and they would stumble into the playoffs. The game was televised on a Sunday afternoon and I was ready. I cleared the deck of all plans and got into game mode. Needless to say, things went badly. The Broncos (as my friend Mark always says) "played down to the level of their opponent" and lost in overtime (Rick Wallace, if you are out there, I owe you $5).

As the shock of losing the game set in, I realized that I had just spent more than four hours of my life rooting for my team and they had disappointed me again. I know fans should be fans forever and never waver, but it was at this moment that I decided that I would not be a Broncos fan in 2007. No Sunday afternoons watching games, no checking of scores, nothing. I'm going cold turkey.

Well, sort of. If the Broncos are playing in January 2008, you can count on me being there. And, somehow, My Yahoo! page still shows Broncos scores. In fact, I did happen to notice that in their first pre-season game this week they beat the 40-whiners. Not like I noticed or that I am a fan or anything.... :)

I'm afraid the rumors of IPV4s death are quite true...

2007-08-01T07:32:00.000-07:00

Somehow, I missed the declaration by ARIN that it is finally time to move to IPv6. Good thing I have not held my breath since RFC 1883 came out on IPv6 in 1995 waiting for this moment.... The topic came up as Robert and I were out for drinks with a few friends last night at a bar in San Francisco. Yes, it is true, when networking geeks go out and party we talk about the wildest and raciest stuff ;)

Ars Technica has a good discussion of the technical issues around migrating the world from IPv4 to IPv6 along with some good insights on how to deal with the 8th layer of the OSI model (politics) during the migration.

I guess that this means two things for Vyatta: 1) it's a good thing that we have IPv6 support in the product and 2) in another few years even fewer people will understand how IP addressing works and network engineers will be valuable assets (I wrote on this awhile back over on GigaOm here). So, if you're a network engineer go brush up on your IPv6 addressing and protocols, implement your network migration using Vyatta and be prepared to be a scarce commodity for years to come.

The Lore of Trip Reports

2007-07-18T21:21:00.001-07:00

During the early days of cisco when people took a business trip they came back and wrote up a quick trip report to send to the entire company. The trip reports were a way for us all to keep in touch with the many moving parts of our growing company. The reports were usually a few paragraphs long and described the business trip activities with some inevitable humorous travel-related anecdotes. The trip report always included one other item - a fairly detailed description of every meal and foreign food encounter. Restaurant reviews, menus, detailed descriptions of plates and food and prices were required material. As you might expect, some folks were better writers and had more fun with this activity than others (I do recall one exceptionally long trip report that detailed a meal in Paris that I still want to duplicate). Regardless of the skill of the writer, I really enjoyed reading about the trips and the food.

I'm not really sure who did the first trip report - they were already part of the cisco lore when I joined the company in 1990 - but I quickly realized that there was an implicit rule that if I went on a business trip I had to write a report and it had to include the lurid details of my meals. This was not in an employee handbook or written down anywhere, it was just common knowledge - and I relished in the opportunity to contribute to my company and my team. As I think back to those days, I know I wrote a few trip reports but I'm really not sure if they were humorous or memorable, but I know I tried.... I do recall leaving the my cube one day headed out for the airport and hearing someone yell after me, "Don't forget to take notes on the food!"

Then one day, I'm not sure when exactly, I stopped receiving trip reports from my fellow team members. Cisco was booming, growing up culturally, and we were all running as fast as we could to keep up. Trip reports didn't fit in to the culture of Cisco with a capital 'C' as much as they did in the old days when the company was just cisco. Of course, Cisco as a company is a monumental business success story. The lack of trip reports clearly did not hurt the company financially.

At subsequent small companies where I have worked I've tried to start up the culture of trip reports again, usually centered on business and food. To me, it was both fun and nostalgic. Yet, somehow, they never took on the life of their own as we had at cisco.

So, imagine my surprise when I opened up my Vyatta email the other day and saw a trip report from one of our team members (I'll withhold her name now to protect the innocent from embarrassment :-). This trip report was a bit different because she went on vacation to London and met up with a few Vyatta customers on her own time! The trip report included some great feedback from her customer meetings and also some fun anecdotes on what shows to see in London (apparently Spamalot is great) and what are the best tube routes for traversing the city. Even though there was no mention of food, the style of the trip report really brought me back to the early days of Cisco.

I sent her an email thanking her for bringing back great memories and for writing up her trip report (and for taking time on her vacation to meet with customers!). Surprisingly, she was not from cisco (or Cisco :) and did not know about the lore of the old trip reports. She just wanted to share her experiences with her team. As it turns out, she's also empowered to help us build the Vyatta culture. As it should be at a fast growing small company!

So, trip reports for all who choose to write them and thanks again Kirsten for the memories!

Vyatta + Virtualization = new FEP?

2007-07-10T11:57:00.000-07:00

For those of you who were not around for the glory days of networking, back when IBM ruled the roost, the term FEP is more than likely a new one. A FEP is a Front End Processor, a device that was built to sit in front of a mainframe to handle peripherals and network connections because the CPU cycles of the mainframe were too valuable to be spent on moving bits. These were also the days when the mainframe has less CPU cycles than your average modern PC, so it made sense to offload networking and other functions. IBM made a killing on sellng FEPs with model numbers such as 3705, 3745 and 3746.

Today, no-one gives a thought to a PC using the Intel x86 architecture being used for both computational and networking functions. As we've shown at Vyatta, this architecture can handle both functions and achieve a very nice price/performance ratio. In fact, in many networking environments, the CPU has many spare computational cycles to burn - and this has led to many people using Vyatta in combination with a virtual machine environment such as VMWare or XenSource.

And, that got me thinking a bit.... Let's imagine that you build a PC with a 3Ghz CPU (or faster), add a couple of 10Gigabit/sec Ethernet cards, load it with a few gigabytes of memory and then run a virtual machine with Vyatta and other networking/telephony software (Asterisk comes to mind as an example). Given the right software, this PC could do a lot of networking functions in a single box (routing, firewall, vpn, call routing, voicemail, SSL termination, load balancing, anti-spam, and so forth) and reduce the processing load on application servers in a given environment.

So - is a PC running many different networking applications on a very fast LAN connection in front of application servers really any different architecturally than a FEP? Probably not - it should be interesting to see if networks do evolve back to the future.

Good Morning Vietnam!

2007-06-15T08:42:00.000-07:00

Here at Vyatta we use various web analytics tools to understand where our products have been distributed throughout the Internet. One of the interesting reports that these tools give us is the distribution of the Vyatta system globally by geography. As you may suspect, a large distribution of the Vyatta system (46.7%) is here in the US, followed by India (6.3%) and Germany (6.1%).

What surprised me was that the next country in the list was Vietnam!?! The value proposition of open source networking is clearly playing well in multiple global markets. But, why Vietnam? Sure, we're in places that are focused on both quality features and great price/performance as compared to other closed source vendors. But, there may be something else here - it may be that there are geographies and markets that have an intuitive understanding that being open and flexible are key advantages in networking. Or maybe, it's that the networking infrastructures in some geographies don't have the legacy issues of migrating off closed source vendors. In case you were wondering, here are the top 10 countries (and their percentage of active Vyatta systems that we know about):

1. United States: 46.7% 2. India: 6.3% 3. Germany: 6.1% 4. Vietnam: 3.8% 5. China: 3.4% 6. Poland: 3.0% 7. Canada: 2.8% 8. Malaysia: 2.7% 9. United Kingdom: 2.5% 10. Indonesia: 2.1%

A few of the more exotic (at least to me) places that the Vyatta system has reached are Botswana, Algeria, Malta, Kenya and Macedonia.

What are your thoughts on the geographies where the Vyatta system will have the most traction outside of the US?

Vyatta and Digium

2007-05-22T15:32:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we announced a partnership with Digium, the Asterisk company. As those of you who read this blog know, we've been thinking about this partnership for some time and think this partnership makes all the sense in the world. While we don't have the same number of deployments as Asterisk (yet!), we're seeing great traction into the same end customer markets with the same value propositions: open, flexible, extendable, runs on x86 hardware and very cost-effective. All of those hold true for Vyatta and Asterisk, so we're sure this partnership will be beneficial to both parties!

People Helping People

2007-05-17T08:21:00.000-07:00

When we started Vyatta, we made a conscious decision to make the company based on open source software and principles. We assumed, that since we were open source software, that there would be software coding done by or community that would help us along in our product development. We have leveraged and contributed to a number of open source projects (XORP, iptables, FreeSWAN, etc.), but in reality we have not seen a wealth of intricate router/firewall/VPN code patches, bug fixes and features from our developer community. Don't get me wrong, we've seen some great code from the developer community and we strongly encourage this to continue, but thinking back on things it makes sense that Vyatta users should spend their time extending our system for their specific environments. Networks are complex systems and the Vyatta system clearly appeals to users who need the flexability of an open source solution.

With this said, I have been very impressed with the way our user community has supported each other. We now have a good number of very knowledgeable users that we have never met (Arturo, Jacobo, Jon, Nick and others I am talking about you :) that provide excellent answers to our community. We see new people on the vyatta-users mailing list everyday and I am sure that this community support will continue to grow quickly. This involvement helps us out each and every day - thank you to everyone!

We're also impressed with the way people have been helping us test out the Vyatta system. Nick has done some extensive testing and www.openmaniak.com has built a Vyatta tutorial. These are some of the most visible examples of community involvement and if you know of others, please let me know.

We're watching the community grow, let's keep having people help people!

Comcast + open source = pressure for telcos?

2007-05-07T13:12:00.000-07:00

I'm embarrassed to say that's it has been a month since I last posted here. I'll definitely try to pick up the pace - things have been busy on multiple fronts. As a partial excuse, some of you have noted that I've been fairly busy posting on GigaOm on various topics.

Back on track, today Zimbra, the open source alternative to Microsoft Exchange, announced a partnership with Comcast - the same folks that led our recent Series B investment.

This latest news makes complete sense to me, as Comcast is interested in using their large fiber and cable infrastructure to deliver integrated voice, video and data products to both the consumer and enterprise markets. While they have a good market position, they need to keep innovating to stay ahead of the telcos, specifically AT&T and Verizon here in the US. Leveraging open source for that innovation, whether for network infrastructure (Vyatta) or the hosted email (Zimbra) gives them better economics and avoids a vendor lock with either Cisco or Microsoft. Better operational costs leads to better customer pricing for their target markets and larger overall market share.

I think Comcast's use of open source to build products and services is a great strategy - it should help keep pressure on the telcos for now.

An open source car

2007-04-05T10:31:00.000-07:00

I've read a few stories about a Dutch company making an open source car. Seems like the open source philosophy can permeate into multiple technology arenas. I'll definitely be tracking the progress here, but not after drinking too much open source beer.

Vyatta Series B Funding

2007-04-04T09:18:00.000-07:00

I am sure that most of you have seen the news that Vyatta announced our Series B funding led by Comcast Interactive Corp. There has been a lot of news about this funding and the move by Comcast to endorse the Vyatta open source system. Needless to say, it is a very exciting time to see this endorsement from such a progressive service provider!

Vyatta has now raised about $18.5 million dollars from four venture capital companies. This funding should take Vyatta far into the future and allow for the expansion of product development, sales and marketing.

To those of us in the venture capital community, this is a modest amount of money for a company that has made as much progress as Vyatta. Yet, there is a perception that open source companies do not need the capital investment required of other, more traditional, startups. Before we did the initial funding on Vyatta, I did a fairly comprehensive study of the open source companies that had been funded across multiple areas of technology (security, storage management, network management, operating systems, and so forth). On average, these companies required $20.5 million dollars of funding before being acquired, doing an IPO or reaching cash-flow breakeven. So, in my mind, Vyatta is right on track.

While building an open source company definitely provides great leverage for engineering and product development efforts, there are a number of business activities that are still inherent to build a successful business. In the case of Vyatta, we've spent money building a world-class service and support organization, staffed engineering to augment and contribute to the open source projects we use and have been fairly active in marketing and public relations. So, yes, we are open source and that helps a lot, but we still have a business to build and run and that takes capital.

Commodity Compute goes Truckin'

2007-03-27T12:21:00.000-07:00

It's been a few weeks since I posted here - I've been traveling on business and am now just catching up a bit. I saw the new release on the Concentro portable data center from Rackable today. This seems like a very interesting way to scale commodity compute and to bring it where required on a temporary or semi-permanent basis. Don't have a data center - we'll bring it to you! BTW - anyone need a router or firewall running on those servers? :)

Performance Testing

2007-03-08T15:23:00.001-08:00

One of the main issues that people have with using x86 architectures for their compute or networking environment is performance. For the past 15 years the industry has pounded into everyone's head that you must have proprietary processing power and custom hardware to do the basic functions of a router, firewall and VPN concentrator: forward packets, handle layer 2/3 table maintenance, do stateful packet filtering and terminate encrypted tunnels.

Since our inception, we Vyattans never believed that and we always knew the x86 architectures could handle the router and firewall needs of small-to-medium enterprises.

The first validated third party proof of this fact went live onto our website yesterday in the form of a report from The Tolly Group. You can download the results here. This report compares the Vyatta system on a Dell PowerEdge PC to a Cisco 2821 ISR.

Two items of note about this report:

We know performance is not everything that you look for in a router, firewall and VPN concentrator. Still, knowing the performance characteristics of the product you are using can help in network planning and design.
We know we are comparing ourselves at present to a fairly low-end Cisco ISR. And check out the price/performance results - twice the performance for half the price.

Stay tuned for more results in the future - you won't be disappointed!

Nat Torkington on Open Source

2007-02-24T08:47:00.002-08:00

Nat Torkington wrote an interesting blog post on open source titled "Is "Open Source" Now Completely Meaningless? that can be found here.

I really liked Nat's article, although I did find a few facts about Vyatta and our source code access incorrect. I've tried to post a comment to this article on the O'Reilly website, but when I post my comment I get a Movable Type error from their server. That's fine, I know sometimes things don't work as planned :)

Here is the comment I wrote on Nat's blog post - hopefully I'll get a chance to post this soon! :)

======

Hi Nat,

Thanks for the comments on Vyatta and our OFR. We have had our source code repository available since our inception and have a link to it on our public wiki here. The community that has been using this source code has mailing list that can be found here.

We encourage folks to build our product from source code and to modify it as they desire. For those that want to use the OFR but don't need to modify the source or compile from scratch, we do offer a .iso, as you point out, at this URL.

Admittedly, we could make the link to the source code more visible on our site - you do have to go to the Community section and then into the wiki - so thanks for the feedback.

======

UPDATE: I just heard from Nat and he's going to fix the Moveable Type problem so I can post my comment. You should see the above comment appear soon on his blog. Thanks Nat!

wsRadio.com interview

2007-02-16T23:34:00.000-08:00

Although I am not known as the voice of Vyatta, you can hear my interview on wsRadio that was taped yesterday here. I think the interview went well and it was fun to do, even if I was a bit nervous at the start! You can hear an interview with Kelly from back in August here as well. Please let us know what you think of the interviews!

OFR review by Nick Davey

2007-02-02T08:16:00.000-08:00

I must admit that when I saw the Google alert I have setup on "vyatta" bring up this link, I was a bit worried. When you see a review of a product from "An Angry Geek", it will make any person involved with the product begin to wince.... That's why I was happy to see a well-balanced and fair review the OFR and it's functionality by Nick Davey here. Thanks Nick!

Sun still gets it

2007-01-22T16:26:00.000-08:00

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

2007-01-15T08:27:00.000-08:00

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!

The high tech wheel alignment

2006-12-14T11:32:00.000-08:00

I had to schedule a front end alignment for my car today (bought new tires and figured it was time to get the wheels aligned too). So, I called up my local auto repair shop for an appointment. The friendly voice asked about the year and model of my car. To my surprise, he then said, "Let me see if we have the software upgrade to do that car." Now, I know cars are high tech and all, but front end alignments that require software upgrades?!? Can anyone point me to the open source software for front end alignments? :)

All I wanted was frickin' sharks with open source laser beams on their heads!

2006-12-13T07:59:00.000-08:00

Where can't open source philosophy be relevant these days? Beer - check. Medicine - check. Routers - check :)

Slashdot.org reports on a New York City company doing laser etching on electronics devices - and doing it all open source, of course :) Check it out here. Very groovy baby!

Hey - we're compatible!

2006-12-12T17:11:00.000-08:00

Today Vyatta announced their latest code update, version 1.1! While there are a lot of interesting features in this release, the most interesting and exciting feature is the Debian package compatibility. I've written about the upcoming extensibility and I'm excited to see this feature get released!

With release 1.1 you can load nearly any Debian package on your OFR. Here are some examples of network packages that could be interesting (from the collection of stable network Debian packages):

6tunnel: A TCP proxy for non-IPv6 applications
argus: IP network transaction auditing tool
autossh: Automatically restart SSH sessions and tunnels
bing: Empirical stochastic bandwidth tester

...and that is after a 30-second perusal and not scrolling down past the b's :) I could go crazy finding interesting packages to run on an OFR if I ventured into other Debian software packages.

Many of you have already voted for your favorite open source package on our TopEnhancements wiki page and I am sure we'll start to see these integrated into OFRs across the globe.

What Debian package are you going to load onto your OFR first? Let us know!

The Washington Post on the "New Dot-Economy"

2006-12-04T20:27:00.000-08:00

I can't believe that it's been over a month since my last post. Time sure does fly around the holiday season! I have no real good excuse, except that my full-time job as a venture capitalist has kept me pretty busy of late :)

Back in September you may have seen the Forbes magazine cover story on Cheap Revolutionaries that recognized the power of open source software married with commodity compute. Now, the Washington Post has an article that comes out tomorrow on the New Dot-Economy that covers the current wave of Internet startups. Of course, Vyatta has a prominent mention! :)

This is great press for Vyatta and one of our customers, Adify. As the article mentions, Adify recently replaced a Cisco router in their infrastructure with an OFR and it's working great - look for more news coming about Vyatta soon!

The world is flat!

2006-10-30T15:24:00.000-08:00

My daughter loves Boowa and Kwala on a site called UpToTen Kids. She loves the songs in French, much to the delight of my wife.

Being a geek, after hours of watching Boowa and Kwala sing and dance, I decided to find out more about the company. On the main webpage, I found that UpToTen is located in Port Louis, Mauritius. I think I'm fairly well-educated in geography (last count I have been to 70+ countries in my travels) and I honestly had no idea to the location of Mauritius. A quick web search later, I found the island located in the Indian Ocean.

A few moments later I found that the website for the company appears to be hosted at Rackspace, so those songs my daughter watches are not traversing three-quarters around the globe to reach our home, but I'm pretty sure that folks in Port Louis are uploading content from there. Even if they are not, some communication between the Indian Ocean and the Bay Area exists so my daughter can enjoy Boowa and Kwala songs in French.

I'm fairly sure that the Vyatta OFR is not in that transmission path yet, but sometimes I truly marvel at how the Internet and networking technologies have flattened out our world. Since Vyatta is helping to expand the Internet with open-source options, we're working to grow the market and to spread data packets with songs in them across the globe :)

At least I have a nice personality....

2006-10-27T09:37:00.000-07:00

Begin shameless vanity warning.... I was at the Eastwick Communication's "Black and Orange Bash" last night and had a great time. At that event, a friend of mine pointed out that all of the photos of me speaking at STIRR 1.7 were not exactly flattering. I guess if PR folks think your photos are bad, then they are bad! I'll do my best to do better next time - I do think that I look different in person, but I'll never know :)

Next time I'll make Dave do the public speaking gigs!

Extensibility is key

2006-10-25T11:04:00.000-07:00

Extensibility and flexibility of the OFR has always been of interest to many of our customers and prospects. We firmly believe that being open source enables our solutions to be used on unique ways that are just not possible with closed source and proprietary solutions.

Recently, I was explaining to a friend of mine about the OFR and he immediately found a use for his environment. As it turns out, management at his company has the suspicion that some employees are using the company's Internet connection to surf some non-work related websites (insert your favorite vice here). To set the stage, his overall network is pretty modest with one Cisco 3800 router serving 3 LANs and a single fractional T3 connection. As a solution, he was examining buying an application layer switch at a cost of about $20K.

And then the flexibility of the OFR hit him.... "You mean I could use your product on a Dell box I already have and then write a script to automatically add to the firewall rules for the non-work related sites on the OFR itself? Or, I could use tcpdump on the OFR to automatically look for URLs in the traffic and build the firewall rules automatically?" I agreed that his concept would work and gave him a few words of caution about running tcpdump 24x7 :) Still, I can easily imagine running tcpdump on one core of a dual-core Intel box while the OFR ran simultaneously on the other core....

To be entirely fair, you could do something similar in a Cisco environment. My friend could setup Netflow export on his Cisco 3800 router and setup a Netflow collector such as cflowd on a Linux box. And on that Linux box he could run the same script he is developing to look at the traffic and build us the firewall rules. Then he could write another script to transfer the firewall rules with HTTP or TFTP to the Cisco 3800 and load the new firewall configuration. That seems a bit harder, far less flexible and probably more problematic than writing the script on the OFR itself.

Granted, writing scripts and tweaking code is not for the average network engineer. But, it's good to know that the extensibility and flexibility exists in the OFR. The closing thought from my friend was pretty simple, "I could never have done this directly on my Cisco 3800."

We'll see how his project turns out - a little time and some scripts could save him $20K and get us another customer!

How not to upgrade

2006-10-12T16:30:00.000-07:00

I was asked to help upgrade a Vyatta OFR recently and broke a number of cardinal rules about doing a router software and configuration upgrade. Granted, it's been a few years since I was personally responsible for doing a router upgrade and I figured it was like riding a bike. Well, as it turns out I may have to put back on my training wheels!

Here are the rules for upgrading a critical piece of network infrastructure like a router, especially if you want to keep your users happy:

Upgrade after hours
Test the software
Verify the configuration
Have a fallback plan

I did my upgrade during office hours when users were active on the router (although I did warn the users about the upgrade and told them to expect "a few minutes of downtime" :). I did not test the software upgrade beforehand nor did I verify the configuration. Lastly, of course I did not have a fallback plan. Bad, bad, bad, bad.

So, I took down the OFR and proceeded to load the new packages and software updates. The software came right up and all was well. Feeling good at this point.

The next step was to load up the configuration. The plan was to copy the configuration file to the OFR and away we go.... The problem was that I edited the configuration file using MS Notepad and that inserted some control characters (^M, carriage return) to each line. The OFR did not like those characters and it took me a few minutes to figure that out. Time was ticking away and the good feeling I had was waning. I tried to edit the MS Notepad using vi on the OFR (and I'm pretty good at vi). For whatever reason I was having terminal console issues (I'll just blame Hyperterm) and the editing was not going well. We were far past the "few minutes of downtime" and I did not have a fallback plan. Users were getting restless and the only plan was to go forward.

After a few more minutes of struggling to edit the configuration file and tweaking my Hyperterm settings to no avail, panic started to set in. I don't panic especially well (who does really?!?) and decided that the best plan at this point was to re-type in my configuration file manually. That task seemed a bit daunting as the OFR configuration was over 400 lines! I got started by entering my network addresses and then immediately firing up DHCP and NAT so the users could get back on-line. Once I verified that the users could get to google.com again the panic subsided considerably. Most of the rest of the configuration was for the firewall, so we were a bit exposed for a few minutes as I frantically typed firewall configuration commands.

Nevertheless, the upgrade got done and the users are happy. Next time, I'll make sure I follow the cardinal rules. That is, if anyone ever lets me near an OFR upgrade again :)

Fonality acquires trixbox

2006-10-04T10:48:00.000-07:00

Tom Keating interviews Chris Lyman, CEO of Fonality, about their acquistion of trixbox today. Trixbox, also known as Asterisk@Home, provides a .iso image that turns a PC into an IP PBX.

Here at Vyatta, we think that projects that enable people to turn commodity PC hardware into nework devices need to be applauded - so we applaud the acquisition! Like we've said before, the cat is out of the bag for proprietary networking and telephony vendors that use closed hardware and software. Why do you need proprietary hardware for most network and telephony applications when you have the power and accessability of the Intel hardware platform flooding the market? Vyatta turns a PC into a router/firewall with a bootable .iso image. Fonality now does the same for an IP PBX. Do I see a trend here?

STIRR it up

2006-10-04T10:41:00.000-07:00

For those of you in the Bay Area, come hear me give the 60-second pitch on Vyatta at the next STIRR event in Palo Alto on October 11th. You can find more details about the event here. I hope to see you there!

And, yes, showing my age, the subject line is a Bob Marley reference :) Great song.

Network folks rejoice!

2006-10-02T15:15:00.000-07:00

When we first started Vyatta we predicted that the market for open source networking would attract two different types of buyers, system folks and network folks. I characterized these two types of buyers back in March in this post. We released the software version of the OFR for the systems folks back in July and that has gone very well! Today, network folks, rejoice, for you got your product too! As you may have seen we announced the appliance version of the OFR today.

Another more subtle change today is the ability of our products to be purchased via our online store.

Any feedback on the store and products are always appreciated!

Startup Fun Time

2006-09-27T14:34:00.000-07:00

If you have never worked for a startup, you might not get it. Lots of risk and lots of potential reward. Many failures for every success. Daily swings of up and down that have forced many to mood enhancing (or stabilizing) drugs on a regular basis.

But, if you are lucky, you reach something I call Startup Fun Time. This is an amazing time that gets under your skin and becomes part of your psyche if you're lucky. It's amazing how many folks who have experienced Startup Fun Time never go back to a large company. A mentor of mine once told me that startups are like rollercoasters while large companies are like smooth sailing in a duck pond. Both can be rewarding and successful experiences, depending on your personal sense of adventure. Strangely, I've been involved in four startups and I really don't like real rollercoasters as they scare the broccoli out of me.

I have a vivid memory my first day at a real startup. I was told to go open the office doors for the first time with our only other employee who was going to be our office manager. We met at the office space, opened the door and realized that there was absolutely nothing inside. No cubes, no wastebaskets, no phones, nothing. Not a single pen or scrap of paper. The first thing I recall saying was, "Well, I guess we need to go to Office Depot...." Of course, we had nothing to make a shopping list on :)

Startup Fun Times had not begun although the logistics of building a company from scratch did has some intellectual stimulation. Being a one or two person company where the hours are long and the stress of being squashed nearly everyday is not Startup Fun Time. But, slowly, over time, with some success, we reached the world of Startup Fun Time. Then the company got big, went public, got bought, and got sold. Somewhere in that last sentence Startup Fun Time halted and the monotony of the duck pond took hold. Luckily, I left the company before the last few corporate moves and immediately went to join another startup looking for that elusive Startup Fun Time. I was hooked and the drug was not out of my system.

So, what are the components of Startup Fun Time? I think they are more or less this:

Intuitive products. You get it and your mom gets it. Customers buy without huge sales and marketing efforts. Folks really do get what you are doing in an elevator pitch and want to buy.
Small group of motivated people. Generally, the company has less than 200 people. You know everyone and what they do. You know the names of their wives and kids. No-one ever asks, "What do you do here?" I recall the day that someone asked me that question as the day I considered the beginning of the end of Startup Fun Time.
Everyone contributes. Engineers take sales calls, tech writers test code, sales people help spec features and functions. Everyone sees everyone helping out and silos are virtually non-existent. Wheat is quickly separated from the chaff, so to speak.
Spontaneous fun. People at the company have fun at work. Fun is not contrived with "corporate events or retreats" that feel more like work than a retreat. I've seen food fights, wiffle ball bats and radio controlled blimps in the office. No-one had to tell folks to go have fun, they just did on their own.

Yesterday, a fellow Vyattan told me that "this is the fun time" and he's right. Vyatta definitely appears to be entering Startup Fun Time and accelerating toward a successful future. As we grow, it'll be great to watch the fun expand. We'll just have to be careful that as we approach the duck pond we remember how we got there.

The Open Prosthetics Project

2006-09-21T15:28:00.000-07:00

I read a story today in Wired News about Iraq war veteran Jonathan Kuniholm using the open source development model for human prosthetics. The article talks about the Open Prosthetics Project that looks to be an extraordinary undertaking to help out folks that need artificial limbs. This is an amazing project and I sincerely wish them the best of success.

Reading this article I was again reminded how to the importance of the community to an open source project and business. The community can expand the market and reach of an open source project in a unique and rapid manner. So, while our business is clearly different than the Open Prosthetics Project, we share the same overarching open source beliefs, values and community motivation. Closed-source prosthetics companies, you are formally warned :)

The Money

2006-09-19T09:18:00.000-07:00

In case you missed it last week, we announced our $7.5M series A funding. This is a great milestone in our company development and gives us plenty of cushion so we can continue to build the business!

The challenge for us now is to continue to build the community and work on expanding open source networking. If you've got a thought on how you want to see us expand and grow, please drop me a note.

CoolTech Club meeting

2006-09-10T16:26:00.000-07:00

If you're around Menlo Park, CA next Monday night (September 18th) I'll be speaking about Vyatta at the CoolTech Club at 7pm. Hope to see you there!

[...]

A bit of a post-mortem on the CoolTech Club meeting... I had a lot of fun presenting to this technical audience. There were definitely supporters and skeptics of our business in attendance - and both camps were not shy about their opinions :) I firmly believe in healthy debate as you have to challenge all business and technical assumptions to be successful. Thanks CoolTech Club - it was fun!

Open source beer

2006-09-08T11:28:00.000-07:00

Lawrence Lessig writes in Wired about some Danes that are using the open source model for their beer - remarkably called Free Beer. Basically, they publish the recipe (the source code, so to speak) and allow people to brew their own. If you make and distribute changes to the code, err, the recipe, the license requires you to publish the changes to www.freebeer.org.

So, you can make you own beer and it will taste just the real Free Beer. That is if you compile the code, err, make the recipe correctly. Truthfully, I'd probably rather pay someone to make the beer for me and serve it to me in frothy mug along side some wings and nachos. But, each to their own.

And there is the main point - open source licenses give the consumer a choice. You can choose to make your own router/firewall or your own Free Beer. The source is there for the taking. Or you can chose to have someone produce a router/firewall image and brew the beer for you for a reasonable fee. I'd contend that when you consume a sufficient number of router/firewall devices on your network or enough pints you're probably willing to pay for some support services as well - especially if you consume both at the same time :)

I know how the OFR performs and operates but I have no idea how Free Beer tastes. Anyone brew a pint on their own yet? Got some nachos handy?

Data and telephony worlds colliding!

2006-09-06T15:48:00.000-07:00

Yes, Seinfeld fans, that titles is a blatant rip-off of George's worlds colliding in a classic episode :) I remember when there were separate data and telephony networks in most enterprises. Completely separate people, departments, management and technology. When someone was added, moved or changed you had to go talk to both the data networking folks and the telephony folks - they were rarely the same person or even in the same department. A phone system, a PBX, was proprietary software running on proprietary hardware (ATT, Rolm, Nortel, etc.) and data networks were running protocols that rarely see the light of day today outside of a historical textbook (Xerox XNS, Banyan Vines, Appletalk, etc.).

Today, I find it hard to imagine an enterprise IT department that does not handle both the data and telephony needs of an organization. And, in many cases, it may even be the same IT personnel handling both the data and telephony networks, especially with the acceleration of VOIP throughout the enterprise. So, the wall came down between the data network and telephony folks. Worlds colliding!

Today, companies like Sangoma and Digium are building hardware and supporting open source telephony software like Asterisk that runs on commodity x86 hardware. And the Vyatta OFR provides the data networking functionality for the enterprise on the same software. I've already written about how the two pieces of software could (should?) come together on the same hardware platform and this elicited some interesting responses. Some folks want to keep the wall up between the telephony and data worlds for reasons of not wanting a single point of failure and ease of administration. I can see that point in some situations.

The point I can't see is when folks approach me and say that the systems have to be separate because of compute concerns. With single-core, dual-core and quad-core x86 hardware available, the compute power of most modern laptops runs circles around the proprietary hardware compute power in the old PBX. Same holds true for what exists in most modern proprietary hardware routers - check inside your low-end and mid-range router and I'm willing to bet you find an x86 processor or a PowerPC chip (the same chip that used to run your Mac). If commodity hardware can run databases, desktops, webservers, middleware servers, grid computing and so much more, I find it very hard to believe that bringing together telephony and data networks is too much of a stretch. Let's see those worlds collide!

Back from the islands

2006-08-29T14:28:00.000-07:00

I work in the VC world now, so I had to take a vacation in August. Apparently, that is the rule. Apparently, I did not follow the VC rules perfectly according to Sand Hill Slave, as I did not go to Sun Valley but choose a more tropical destination. After my week off I am back thinking more about open source networking.

My recent post of the OFR+Asterisk generated some interesting email with folks lobbying for their favorite open source packages to be included with the OFR as well. OpenVPN seems popular with many Vyattans.

While I was away I see that Jessica Simpson had some things to say about open source networking at RouterGod. I guess that goes to show you that you never know where your bits may land.... Now that Jessica is divorced, maybe we can hit up her ex-husband as a customer too? :)

I also noticed that we have a few more locations on our Frappr map - very cool!

OFR + Asterisk - together at last?

2006-08-15T12:54:00.000-07:00

As you can probably imagine, rarely a day goes by where I am not talking to people about Vyatta and the revolution of open source networking. Over the past few weeks I've noticed a pretty consistent trend in these conversations - people are asking me about running a single server with both the OFR and Asterisk simultaneously. The integration of voice and data services seems to be hot topic these days.

We're tracked interest in running other open source platforms on the OFR on a wiki page and Asterisk does make a showing there, but with votes both for and against. I think the argument for running the two together is the integration of multiple networking products and features on a single server that eases administration and deployment. I suspect that the argument against has to do with having the server be a single point of failure for both the voice and data networks. I don't know where I fall as both arguments are valid in various networking environments. However, I do feel passionately about giving the community a choice and seeing where the market evolves. Our closed source brethren seem to be focused on integrating multiple features on a single piece of proprietary hardware, so precedent is there in the market.

So, anyone out there want to make an image with both the OFR and Asterisk? Or maybe another open source networking package should be packaged into a single image first? If I go back to the Top Enhancements page of the wiki maybe the OFR should be bundled with the Looking Glass or nmap packages as a next step? Please let us know your thoughts!

Virtualizing Vyatta

2006-08-07T14:19:00.000-07:00

Since the inception of Vyatta, we're thought about the potential of building virtual router/firewalls for the enterprise and service provider markets. It looks like some folks have been working on porting the OFR to Xen and VMWare (see Tarry's blog on porting Vyatta to VMWare here).

I suspect that a virtualized version of the OFR will have many interesting applications: virtual router for ISP customers, virtual firewalls for different enterprise labs and LANs, separation of production and staging traffic, test environments for websites and servers, etc. How do you plan on using the OFR in a virtual environment? You won't have any of those pesky licensing issues with our software when you virtualize it, unlike the issues around virtualizing Windows and other enterpise applications.

At least one thing is clear - virutalization is here for multiple technologies, as I wrote here on the Panoblog. Let's see where this goes with the OFR... could be very interesting!

Put your OFR (virtualized or not) on the Vyatta Users page on Frappr!

Sun gets commodity hardware

2006-07-28T07:16:00.000-07:00

I just read an interesting post by Jonathan Schwartz of Sun about the rise of general purpose hardware in the data center. It's a good read that can be found here. If Sun, the company that was built on proprietary silicon and software, can see the light to move to commodity hardware without ASICs for the largest and most complex of enterprise applications, how far behind can the move to commodity hardware for networking really be?

Granted, this is undoubtedly a defensive move by Sun against IBM/HP/Dell hardware and RedHat software, but the other shoe has dropped in the industry.

It is becoming increasingly clear that commodity hardware and open source software is a large wave that is coming to multiple shores/markets. Stay tuned proprietary networking vendors - surfing lessons are in order!

It's 100 degrees and Robert's feelin' alright!

2006-07-25T09:41:00.000-07:00

I've known our CTO, Robert Bays, for many years. We've worked together at many companies here in the SF Bay Area (Digital Island, Telegis Networks, Proficient Networks) and one topic of conversation that we always have is about the heat (or lack thereof) in the local climate. The conversation usually goes something like this:

Allan: Wow, it's hot out there - like 80 degrees!
Robert (wearing a leather jacket and gloves): This is nothing. It's always too cold here.
Allan: Are you crazy?  It's hotter then hell!
Robert: Anything less than 100 degrees is downright nippy.
Allan: Where did you grow up again?
Robert: Texas. Sigh... I have to remind you of this every week.
Allan: I can't wait for it to cool down again.
Robert: Time to break out the ski parka.

Well, the local weather has been downright brutal the past week with temperatures reaching over 100 degrees in many locations, including Vyatta Galactic HQ. Combine the heat outside with the hot product launch this week and it's a scorcher! Robert must be feeling alright!

The Day Has Come

2006-07-24T15:39:00.000-07:00

Today we announced our first service and support products for the OFR! It's been a pretty exciting day for all Vyattans (even those of us that are just investors :) There have been a lot of great press articles on the product release in Network World, GigaOm, and RedHerring. We also just got awarded one of the Top Ten Startups from LightReading! Needless to say, the webservers are working overtime today!

Sort of hidden behind all of the press was the official 1.0 release of the LiveCD product, available for download here.

So, R-Day is here. Let the disruption in the marketplace begin!

NSF support for open source networking

2006-07-20T10:21:00.000-07:00

I was interviewed by Katie over at GigaOM yesterday about the new NSF funding for an open source wireless mesh project. Pretty cool stuff and continues the trend of more funding for open source in the networking market. More funding for open source networking projects should continue and we're excited to help folks take those projects and turn them into viable products.

If open source wireless mesh takes off, it could make life interesting for the vendors feeding the Muni WiFi deployments, like Google's in Mountain View, CA. Personally, wireless access in public places is very convenient and if I ever in an airport for more than an hour I always by the service to download email and write blog posts.

If I can blog over a wireless mesh built on open source software that leads to a commodity hardware device running our open source router/firewall, all the better! That day is not too far off from what I can tell :)

The Candidate (rc1) Has Arrived!

2006-07-13T11:12:00.000-07:00

I've received a few emails from folks informing me that Bon Jovi is not an 80s metal band, but more Neo-Glam Rock than anything else. I agree and I'd like to point out that on the same playlist with Bon Jovi I have AC/DC and Black Sabbath! If you were ever honored enough to see Angus Young play live you know he's not Neo-Glam :)

Okay, since that issue is behind us, I'd like to congratulate the Vyatta community on the release of the first release candidate for version 1.0! You can get to the download page here. I would be remiss if I did not point out that Dave would want you to first register with us here.

It's taken us just about a year of hard work to turn a number of great open source projects into our first product release candidate (1.0rc1). We're busily banging on the code in our labs and hope to be able to promote a release candidate to our official 1.0 release in the near future. We also hope that lots of you folks out there will try this release candidate and continue to give us feedback! So, help us out and test, test, test!

While you're at it, add your location to our growing Frappr map!

If you happen to be testing out the OFR while listening to Neo-Glam Rock or some hard core Metal - all the better :)

Bad Days Don't Begin with Bon Jovi

2006-07-11T08:52:00.000-07:00

Yes, I am an aging 80s metal fan.... This morning I was driving down the highway in the sunshine listening to some classic Bon Jovi (You Give Love a Bad Name, Livin' on a Prayer, Bad Medicine and a few others) at an obnoxiously loud volume having a great time. All of this before any coffee.... If you're into metal and have not put those tracks into your iPod, I'd strongly recommend it!

So, here I was driving along, doing my best lip-sync/air guitar at 85 MPH (As David Letterman would say, "Kids, don't do this at home") thinking about how the MP3 music format has completely disrupted the music industry. FM radio stations are dying - why listen to what the station is playing if you have all of your songs on your iPod? Proprietary music formats have transformed the recording industry distribution system by being tied to Internet distribution (see iPod/iTunes/AAC and Microsoft IPTV/WMA) and it all started with the conversion of music to open formats. Basically, an open format changed industry and made new business and distribution models possible. It did not hurt that the compression and encoding technology for MP3 resulted in portable music (it can fit on a CD or on a Flash card) that sounds pretty damn good to my ears at full volume screaming down the highway.

Then I realized that we're essentially doing the same thing with Vyatta and the OFR. We're transforming the closed and proprietary world of networking products and producing an open networking solution that is easily portable to many different devices (today all x86-based systems). It may turn out that folks take the OFR and produce proprietary versions of it embedded within their solutions. Others may want to take the OFR and use it with our support packages. Time will tell - we're just at the beginning here. The key in my mind is that we've opened up the industry and are forcing folks to consider an alternative to what previously existed. I imagine about 10 years ago some record producer scoffed at the idea of distributing individual songs over the Internet for less then $1. And I am sure that some folks in the proprietary, closed networking companies are scoffing at Vyatta right now.

It's okay, I'm listening to Bon Jovi and having a great time!

Vyatta on Frappr

2006-07-05T13:40:00.000-07:00

I was doing some surfing this morning and came across Frappr. Truthfully, I'm not exactly sure what Frappr is or wants to become, but it seems like a map-driven social networking tool that can link to MySpace and others. Of course, the first thing I did was to create a Vyatta Users Frappr map that you can find here. If you're using any version of the OFR and feel like anonymously telling the world where you are located, please add yourself to the map! You don't have to disclose your name, just your location. We're always curious as to where our bits have landed!

Which copy of the OFR has wandered the farthest from Vyatta world headquarters in San Mateo, CA?

Da New Man

2006-06-27T22:43:00.000-07:00

As many of you have probably seen, we announced today that we've hired Kelly Herrell as our new CEO. Kelly comes to us with an excellent pedigree in executive leadership, networking, Linux and open source licensing. Besides his impressive background, Kelly is a great person who is very motivated to lead the team at Vyatta. We're very excited to have Kelly in the company - his energy and enthusiasm is already permeating into the cubicle walls :)

The hiring of Kelly marks an important transition for Vyatta. We're focused on building the company, expanding the executive team under Kelly's leadership and preparing Vyatta to migrate from delivering a beta product to product launch. It's time to move the company to it's next phase and we welcome Kelly as our Vyattan leader [side note: no real negative feedback in the term "Vyattan" yet :)].

Welcome Kelly! I hereby relinquish my unofficial title as "Da Man" to your capable hands!