If you’re reading this you know I went to Arista Networks – and to put it simply, we do things a LOT differently than traditional networking companies, and a lot differently from most VC-funded companies too. Now my boss, our CEO Jayshree Ullal, would kill me if I put up a post with the ‘secret awesome sauce’ that comprises how our engineering team builds software (what I can say is its the most fully automated development environment I have ever seen – a large percentage of the code is auto generated – especially the annoying bits that enables interprocess communications, test is automated so there is no BS regression testing, etc).

What I think is pretty equally awesome though is how we rapidly embraced the cloud and SaaS/IaaS capabilities. Here’s a few examples…

• I just wrote a press release for a product launch that is coming up. I used a tool called Scrivener I have worked with a bit that enables me to keep document ‘chunks’ handy and re-use them consistently. Nice for product descriptions, form data on them, and closing boilerplate. This I exported as a text block that I then went to Box.net whom we use for document collaboration.
• In Box.net in the Marketing folder I went to this specific product launch fold and created a Google Word Doc and put my first draft press release into it. Now the entire marketing team gets an email update that I did this and a collection of smart and savvy folks can pile on and help the document get better.
• We made our data sheets in Apple Pages rather than InDesign. Why? Simply because we don’t outsource our doc design and editing to third-party firms or agencies and keep it all in house so we wanted a simple and easy to use tool with decent layout capabilities. You can export from Pages to PDF easily and the Data sheets look good. More importantly when you find a mistake you don’t have to go back to a 3rd party agency to get the doc edited – its done in minutes in house.
• Similarly with our website – I remember taking weeks to get changes through in my previous job. Now we run Joomla! we have a few people who know it quite well and a few more who know how to quickly edit docs, change banners, etc. Web publishing is nicely simplified.
• Our Joomla! instance is hosted in the cloud on a hosting provider – no one has to worry about the hardware, or a disk failure, and so on – keeps the IT burden low.

I can keep going on how we have a BYOD culture from the start, with most people opting for Macs but a few outliers with Linux and such loaded on their PCs, how we use tools like SalesForce and NetSuite to avoid huge onsite server farms with lots of complex software, and how we use hosted PBX services like Fonality – which uses my friend Mark Spencer’s creation Asterisk in a hosted model to lower PBX costs.

We’ve identified what is core to our business – SW development, and kept that in-house in a very secure environment.  We’ve identified what is context – email (Gmail), CRM (SalesForce), ERP/Accctng (NetSuite), Content Management (Box.net), etc – and then worked with them to ensure they met our requirements as we grew and scaled.  I often state that I don’t know why a company our size would ever buy a server for IT – but then I found out we do have three VMs we run in-house for IT: One for NTP, one for DNS, and one for DHCP.  Not bad for 3/20ths of a machine…

The success of many of these companies clearly indicates that we are not alone in this use case – it does seem to be the smart way to build out if your compliance and regulatory environment supports it and you can accomplish your mission effectively.

dg

But seeing as how the gist of NetField Day is to introduce technology companies to technologist bloggers and stir it up, foment some discord/discourse, get the conversation going, and create some awareness I felt that maybe the best thing to do was to turn it around and blog about my experience as a presenter at NetField  (TechField) Day.

So I walked into a room, set up a laptop, and got to present to an audience of very opinionated technologists for a couple of hours.

Turns out I agreed with many, if not all of their opinions.  Even the ones I didn’t agree with seemed to be pretty well thought through and not myopic or religious.  That was a good start, sometimes you get these audiences where someone has such a preconceived notion that you worry that you have no chance of connecting with them – I didn’t get that feel at all.

I got to meet Greg Ferro, whose podcast series, Packet Pushers has achieved near-legendary cult status amongst many network folks.  The funny thing is I am not sure even Greg knows how well known he is because of this hobby of his.  I have had four customers in the past two weeks alone mention to me something to the effect of, “Hey, I heard you on Packet Pushers”!  One of the first customers who said that to me went on to become one of our largest customers – I am definitely a Packet Pushers fan now.  (Gratuitous linking)

There was this chap, Ivan, whom everyone was convinced wouldn’t smile.  It was kind of like Mikey on the Life Cereal ads from my youth I guess so I did whatever I could to try to make Ivan smile.  What I really appreciated though was that even though at one point he did crack a bit of a grin at something or other Ivan wrote a mildly chastising piece on me/Arista — Ivan said that we needed to open up our documentation to non-customers.

What I really appreciated though was that I reached out to Ivan, we had a pretty good discussion about the reasons we should or shouldn’t.  We were both quite frank, learned a bit, and I walked away convinced we should do it.  (As I am writing this our docs are being opened up on our staging site, QA’d, and a little bit of housekeeping from an organizational perspective…)  Thanks Ivan!

The candid feedback matters.  Some people have a hard time listening, its even harder when your critic is informed and savvy, and even harder sometimes when they have a prolific pen.  But its great when they can work with you on making your business better.

Stephen and the gang, thanks for having us at your event!

dg

Arista Booth getting some visitors and traction

Am settling back into a more normal pace and frame of mind after Interop and the launch of the Arista 7500.  Pretty busy several weeks I have to say – I have never worked so hard on a tradeshow booth in my life- I was sort of used to it just ‘appearing’ and then ‘appearing again’ somewhere else.  I realize now, more than ever what all goes into making these types of events successful and how it takes a small army of often under-appreciated people to make these things tick.

This would be my 14th or 15th year going to Interop, and somewhere around my 20th show (counting Atlanta and New York venues).  I remember working in the NOC, setting up the first multi-vendor MPLS network, and over the years it feeling like a class reunion as much as a tradeshow.

My week sort of went like this…

I showed up in Vegas at the booth over the weekend- we got a really interesting and neat location- right by the door, right next to Cisco, VMWare and Riverbed – all great neighbors!  At one point Donna Shim from Cisco came over to me when I was screwing something together, setting up a demo, placing signage, or something and said, “You are doing booth setup?”  She then started laughing hysterically.  I think that summed it up.  Ted was kind enough to score me a screwdriver and knife that we needed to open up some boxes, or I would still be staring at them wondering how to get my demo working…

Brooke, Sean, Tom, Mark, and I plied our trade for most of Sunday watching things start coming together.  Vanessa from Blazer, our exhibit partner, was a gem on getting a lot of the heavy lifting done, but we were a bit stressed on two main areas: getting our Internet access working was problematic and impeded our demonstrations which were remotely executing; and figuring out how to cool the Ixia test gear in the Arista 7500 demo pod!

The guys from the Switch Super|NAP were amazing and set up a phenomenal looking 10-Rack T-SCIF in our booth area (Thermal Separation Compartment In-Facility) which we then kitted out with about 240 ports of 10GbE, some copper some fiber, in order to showcase some amazing stuff from our partners – Joyent, Greenplum, Adva, Terranetics, Fulcrum, etc…

Getting the largest and highest performance single-device 10Gb Ethernet test working in two racks without special cooling was up to Sean and the great guys from Ixia – JJ and Ali.  After we figured out that the test equipment sort of blew hot air out the front, which our switch then ingested and spit out the back we got to do some crazy engineering – involving what looked suspiciously like a dorm room fan or two, to get the test gear to sort of behave like data center gear.  (For future reference – test and measurement equipment is almost always not designed for front-to-rear cooling)

One thing I love about my job is that EVERYONE is technical and EVERYONE does booth duty - even our chairman and CDO!

By Tuesday morning things were coming together- at one point I was climbing the truss to liberate a wireless AP we needed to reconfigure a bit, and Jeff and Chuck thankfully got that working with about 4 minutes to spare to we could get the vEOS, VM Tracer, and EOS demos up and running remotely.  Whew!

The b’ARISTA got cranking making some good coffee – lattes so good even Stephen Foskett blogged about them!  (and thankfully didn’t list us as one of those vendors with no tie ins whatsoever between their tradeshow promotions and their corporate brand)

By 10:15 Tuesday the booth was packed, and it pretty much did not let up until the lights dimmed in the evening each day.  I remembered my Chloroseptic and cough drops – mandatory….

I had a really fun panel discussion with some folks from other networking companies.  These are always kind of fun but marginally awkward as a presenter as well often posing a quandary-  the audiences usually want to learn something, do not want an advertorial, and do want to be entertained.  Us vendors on the other hand almost always do not want to ‘get into it’ with each other because guys like Mike Fratto and Jim Duffy are always sitting in the audience pen in hand just waiting for it.  A bit nerve-wracking to say the least, but quite fun.

I think everyone on the panel requited themselves well, and while representing our respective franchises points-of-view we also did remind the audience that the great thing about the networking industry, and Interop in particular, is that while we sometimes trade barbs, we all agree our products MUST trade packets and frames.  Multi-vendor interoperability is the name of the game- if there is not that, then we as an industry suffer.

Special shout-out to Jim Metzler for hosting an awesome panel, and several hundred engaged end-users for joining and laughing at my occasional joke.  Martin – glad you appreciated my thoughts on large layer-2 versus tunneled layer-3 designs, and Rick Kagan – thanks for the text messages that vibrated my leg while I was trying to figure out how to respond to Thomas Scheibe on something about FCoE

Wednesday morning was pretty cool.  The Best of Interop awards in the main keynote area was such a great ove by show management – 2, 4, and 5 years ago when I was up for other awards it was in some random part of the tradeshow floor – having it in the Mandalay Ballroom gave them a real Academy Awards feel…  I am sure I speak for everyone nominated and attending when I say that it really made us feel special and made the awards that much ore meaningful to us.  Thank you.

I’ve been fortunate enough to be part of some great organizations and have a couple Best of Interop plaques around – always from the Infrastructure category   But I never thought that we’d win the big one – the overall Best in Show now that was cool!  I was sitting back off to the right with my iPhone 3GS recording Jayshree hopping up on stage and trying to drag her entourage up with her   (Thanks boss!)

Arista 7500 - Grand Prize, Best of Interop 2010

Racing from there back to our booth area I think half the show came to enjoy a great mocha (thanks Robert!) and see what all the fuss was about with the Arista 7500.  The rest of my day was a blur of meetings, impromptu interviews, and crazy schedules.  We headed out with 40-50 customers at 4pm for a tour of the Switch Super|NAP – an insanely well designed and built data center that is about 5 minutes from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center and worth a visit if you are anywhere west of the Rockies.

Thursday was a bit calmer, and around 3pm we started packing things up.  I saw an amazing demo by Aprius of their virtualized I/O system.  It’s not shipping yet – but it really looks promising in carrying PCIe over Ethernet, and consolidating FC, Ethernet, disk controllers, SSD, etc all over Ethernet from the host.  Seriously cool.  I did not get to tour the show floor at all and see what other companies were announcing, demonstrating, or showing off – I’ll have to read the blogs and catch up on what I missed – am sure there was some awesome technology and products there this week.

Spent many hours responding to blogs, tweets, and lots of emails.  Then the race to pack as much as possible before everyone had to start rushing to the airport to catch flights home was on, and a smile of relief started hitting a lot of the faces I saw around.  A well earned weariness too – a long, but rewarding week, and a very good Interop.  Thanks Lenny!

dg

What is the easiest way to account for space/power consumption of a network element?

Am making a spreadsheet comparing different products and looking at longer term costs, maintenance, power, cooling, etc.  I felt that rather than scrubbing the DOE sites and trying to get power costs by state I would just use the national average, but then fell flat on that because I found negotiated rates could be much less than published tariff rates.

Then I stumbled upon what may be an easier solution to my quandary and one inline with what I see a lot of enterprises doing – call a hosting company.  I haven’t talked to too many enterprise customers that are not at least considering if not seriously considering using a hosting environment, or event a full-blown cloud deployment for some portion of their enterprise data center workloads.  Why? – the main reason I keep hearing is that most enterprise customers cannot build big enough to achieve the same economy of scale as a Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc.  So they may as well lease space from a provider who can achieve a higher density, lower PUE, better delta-T, and handle the compliance tasks like SAS 70 Type-II (Switch, Equinix, Corelink, etc) and not to mention the IT assets put within the data center grow at a power/performance curve that usually breaks the facility they are housed within in 5-7 years, so who wants that on their books – better to let the provider manage/operate it.

In asking around I got to an average number of ~$155 per month per kilowatt consumed when in a hosted environment (ping, power, pipe).  Does this seem inline to you or too high/low based on what you are seeing?

With this data you can then extrapolate Watts/10Gb port across several systems and you get variability from $92/year per 10GbE port up to $372/year per 10GbE port assuming $155/month per kilowatt.  (I am eliminating my own companies products from this so as to avoid being a blatant advertorial…) Annualized hosting/power cost comes to $9,400 to $25,800.

I will be the first to admit there are HUGE differences in features, programmability, buffering, network segmentation, encapsulation methods, and Quality of Service Granularity between many of these platforms.  Those that performed the best were usally more ‘switch like’ with smaller buffers, less features, and fixed function ASICs for the data path.  Those at the top end of the spectrum were almost always products like Juniper’s T640/T1600 and Cisco’s CRS – extremely high function core routers with huge performance, buffers, shapers, policers, and probably most importantly a software upgradeable packet processing engine that allows incremental feature additions that execute in the data plane.

It’s clearly not an apples-to-apples and don’t want it to come across that way, my real question is – is using an average of US hosting pricing per kilowatt an effective way to get a model for opex cost/10Gb port or are there other models people would recommend?  Am pretty open to anything right now provided it is accurate and neutrally intentioned.

dg

If you don't like synthetic astroturf, you'd plant real grass, right?

In March 1999 Scott Bradner from Harvard University and Jim McQuaid of NetScout got together and published RFC 2544 – “Benchmarking Methodology.”  In the subsequent eleven years this informational RFC has been used to provide a baseline for testing many networking devices.  It is designed to provide consistency between vendors so an end-customer can make a more informed buying decision and have some idea of the performance and scalability characteristics of the products they are considering.

For many years this RFC was applied by testing companies to provide comparisons and contrasts between different networking vendors.  Recently though, a company who usually takes an ‘elder statesman’ role in the networking industry and takes pride in its public brand image wrote that this was ‘synthetic testing’ and was not in any way indicative of ‘real world’ performance results customers were likely to see.  This was published on their blogs, and then on comments made on NetworkWorld’s web site by their employees renouncing the testing and trying to invalidate the good work of David Newman.

I have a simple question…

“In the last eleven years why didn’t you write a better and more ‘real world’ benchmarking methodology if the one you blast as synthetic is really that deficient?”

I mean, let’s be serious, you are a huge company, and have the resources.  You have lots of people who go to the IETF meetings and try to steer standards.  You have lots of customers and have no problem telling us that, so it can’t be a lack of revenue.   Why not just help us all by writing a better test plan rather than proverbially taking your ball and going home?

As I close this little diatribe let me remind everyone of two fun little stories…

In 2006 Kanye West was up for ‘Best Video Award’ at the European MTV Music Awards.  He won in a smaller category, ‘Best Hip Hop Artist’ but failed to win the prestigious ‘Best Video Award’ losing to a  smaller production.  He stormed the stage and “lashed out in a tirade filled with expletives,” West said he should have won the prize for his video “Touch the Sky,” because it “cost a million dollars, Pam Anderson was in it, and I was jumping across canyons.”

Apparently to the judges it didn’t matter how much Kanye spent, or that he looked cool flying across canyons, they judged on value.

By contrast at the 2009 Academy Awards ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ won Best Picture, Best Direction, and six other Oscars.  As Danny Boyle and then Christian Colson took the stage to thank their teams and supporters their competitors stood up and cheered for their victory.  You never saw Ron Howard, Gus van Sant, or Sydney Pollack trash-talking the Academy for how they voted.

These guys are smart enough to know two things – One, you are measured by how you well you lose as much as by how you win.  Two, if you bad mouth the Academy how will they treat you next year?

Do you want your primary networking vendor to be more of a Kanye West or more of a Ron Howard?

Sometimes the 'golden handcuffs' tarnish the other hands in the company...

Thirteen years ago I worked at a small technology consulting firm, headquartered out of Columbia South Carolina, named The Computer Group.  TCG was acquired by IKON Office Solutions, the copier company.

IKON then went on a spending spree over the next year acquiring many technology companies, largely small to mid-size systems integrators in a fairly classic channel roll-up strategy to build footprint.  This was quite smart given the complexity of digital copier and printing systems coming to market in the mid 1990′s as well as the upside and opportunity to move into adjacent markets aside from their core paper distribution and copier sales and service divisions.

The problem came not in the vision, although I can say that some of the engineers did ask the question, “Ummm, we work for a copier company?  Huh?”

When these companies were acquired almost every company was given an interesting choice – take some payment up front or take a bit smaller amount up front but if the company hits specific P&L targets there is a significant upside (between a 50% to 200% multiplier) that is paid if the targets are hit or exceeded.

Now, we all learned in Sales 101 that leveraged compensation plans tend to be highly motivational to the principals involved, and this case was no different.  Each company was so singularly motivated to achieve their individual targets that the following happened:

1) Each group tried to keep their own identity
Each group almost always referred to themselves by their ‘old’ name, and never as the identity of their new employer.  They never integrated their identities.

2) Cross-Charging became commonplace
Each group started cross-charging the others for any internal resource sharing.  This made it more costly to use internal ‘big company’ resources than it often did to hire your ‘own’ resources because the cost-basis was higher because the other groups wanted to make a profit on each other.

3) No tools integration
Their was no mandate to centralize IT resources, standardize on toolsets, etc.  Each company did things their way, and used any mandate to integrate as an opportunity to complain how ‘corporate was slowing them down’ and was an excuse for why any earn-out targets were not achieved.

4) Internal Competition
Since there was significant overlap in product/services from each group, and no common positioning or strong hand at the helm the groups would compete with each other for customer opportunities.  There was no strategy or consistency in the pricing models between the divisions, and we looked like 20 companies to the end-customer, not one.

5) Haves/Have-Nots
Their was pretty significant disparity as well between the equity distributions between those acquired and those hired.  This led to a haves/have-nots schism in the organization as well.  Many of the new hires would often ask a question I have heard repeated in other organizations where earn-out M&A was tried, “Why am I working so hard to make them so rich?”

The net result?  IKON is still a copier company, does a good job at it.  But they closed the doors on the experiment of being a technology services company.  It is not regarded as a ‘win’.

We can find many reasons why it did not work and I am certain there are other very valid opinions and reasons on why this experiment/investment did not yield the expected business results.  The reason I home in on the most though is the earn-out M&A structure created a culture clash, especially when combined with product/services overlap, and lack of strong leadership.

I have seen recently other companies follow a similar model, and have seen the undercurrents of similar challenges.  Know any?

microseconds: the difference between market makers and spectators

Am hosting a webinar on reducing the latency in high frequency trading environments this coming Wednesday.  (which means, if you know me, that I am working furiously on PowerPoint slides, although I have been using Keynote more lately…)) HFT is pretty interesting to me as it is one of the markets I spend a lot of time focusing on at work and with folks from Solace Systems and Intel joining we will be chatting about how to reduce the latency, specifically on the back-end connections between feed handlers and trade logic and order execution systems.  These are usually TCP based and there is a lot of room for improvement from the base stacks and generic NICs and messaging systems people may use.

We’ll do a follow-up webinar later focusing on the market data feed handlers and scalable multicast as that is very important between the exchange and the feed handlers.  If there are any other topics we should think about, let me know…

If you are interested in registering and joining a healthy chat please click here to register.  If you can’t make the live webcast, no worries – we will be archiving it and enabling the VOD to be watched in arrears.