Open Source Juicer

All we wanted was to run well on Hyper-V...

2009-07-23T18:30:00.000-07:00

This week, Microsoft announced that it would be releasing the optimized virtualization drivers for Hyper-V under the GPLv2 license and had submitted them for inclusion into the mainline Linux kernel tree. That was big news, and all this week the open source community and tech-industry as a whole have been trying to fully process it.

Unexpectedly, Vyatta found itself in the middle of this story. For the past few days, we have remained largely silent, but in the last 24-hours or so, news stories have started to circulate that have bordered on putting words into the mouths of both Vyatta and its employees. In this post, I'll try to set the record straight.

On Monday, after seeing Greg Kroah-Hartman's posting to the Linux kernel mailing list announcing that Microsoft had opened its Hyper-V drivers, Stephen Hemminger, a principle engineer here at Vyatta, created a blog post that provided a little background for what happened. It turns out that Stephen was the one who got this whole thing moving.

In his blog, Stephen wrote:

This saga started when one of the user's on the Vyatta forum inquired about supporting Hyper-V network driver in the Vyatta kernel. A little googling found the necessary drivers, but on closer examination there was a problem. The driver had both open-source components which were under GPL, and statically linked to several binary parts. The GPL does not permit mixing of closed and open source parts, so this was an obvious violation of the license. Rather than creating noise, my goal was to resolve the problem, so I turned to Greg Kroah-Hartman. Since Novell has a (too) close association with Microsoft, my expectation was that Greg could prod the right people to get the issue resolved.

It took longer than expected, but finally Microsoft decided to do the right thing and release the drivers.

Stephen's posting is purely factual and also suggests a lot about his personality. Stephen was simply trying to solve a technical problem (help Vyatta's open source networking system run more optimally in Microsoft Hyper-V environments; we already support optimized drivers for Citrix XenServer and VMware vSphere) and ended up running into a licensing problem (Microsoft's drivers included closed-source, binary-only components that were statically linking with GPL components). While many in the open source community would love to play "Licensing GOTCHA!" with Microsoft on the GPL, immediately posting such a discovery on Slashdot to whip everbody into a frenzy, Stephen isn't that kind of guy. Instead, Stephen decided to work the issue itself, not score PR points. He called Greg Kroah-Hartman at Novell and asked him to approach Microsoft about the issue. Fast forward, and Microsoft makes the (right, IMO) decision to open source the Hyper-V drivers.

In a quest for more drama than occurred in reality, some press accounts have suggested that Stephen or Vyatta "accused" Microsoft of a "GPL violation." As you can tell by reading Stephen's blog posting, nobody "accused" anybody of anything. Stephen merely called the situation to Microsoft's attention, again, working the issue, not the PR. There were no threats, no screaming, no broken fingers, no frothing at the mouth. Just a few calm phone-calls placed behind closed doors, out of the limelight and media focus. And that was that. Microsoft noodled on things. And then it decided to open source the drivers and contribute them to the kernel.

So, beers all around, I say. Microsoft just released its first GPLv2 code and made a large contribution to the Linux kernel. Let's raise a toast and welcome them. Using that contribution Linux can now achieve high performance in a Hyper-V environment. Building on that, Vyatta will shortly deliver optimal performance in a Hyper-V environment as well, further securing our place as the leading virtual networking and security solution, supporting XenServer, vSphere, and Hyper-V.

PS: Gordon Haff has a good write-up and analysis over at Cnet.

Vyatta + Citrix

2009-06-10T11:34:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Vyatta announced a partnership and a new round of investment with Citrix Systems. I wanted to spend a bit of time here explaining why this is important to the market moving forward.

First, a new round of investment is always a good thing when you're a new company. Beyond the obvious goodness of "cash in the bank," this investment shows that Vyatta is really on to something big, and other people believe that, too. If you're working at a startup right now, you can probably attest that funding rounds are few and far between. In the same way that we say a huge number of startup deaths in 2001 and 2002 as investors sat on their hands and money dried up, the same thing has happened with the recent economic troubles, only far worse. There are many VC industry pundits that are predicting a 50% decline in the number of VC firms when this recession is said and done. With that as a backdrop, only the best companies are able to take in new money. I'm happy to say that Citrix has validated Vyatta's importance moving forward.

Now, the question is, why would a company like Citrix make such an investment. The short answer is that there is a lot of synergy (no pun intended for those who attended Citrix's Synergy conference last month in Las Vegas) between Vyatta and Citrix. Citrix is focused on building the best application delivery infrastructure possible. Citrix has application products, services like GoToMeeting, a number of appliances such as NetScaler, and virtualization infrastructure in the form of XenServer. Vyatta compliments those products in several areas.

First, Vyatta works well with Citrix's existing appliance products. Put Vyatta and NetScaler together, for instance, and you have a very effective data center networking and application delivery optimization solution.

Second, Vyatta works well with XenServer. Vyatta has always virtualized well; today, we run on XenServer, VMware, open source Xen, Hyper-V, and even some things like Sun/Oracle VirtualBox (though we only officially support XenServer, VMware, and open source Xen). I think it's now clear that virtualization is a key technology that will impact almost all areas of IT infrastructure, from the data center to the branch office. Further, virtualization is a key technology in the implementation of cloud computing. Citrix has been very strong in putting forth a cloud strategy with its Citrix Cloud Center (C3) architecture and product portfolio. Last month, Citrix announced NetScaler VPX, a virtual appliance version of NetScaler. In the same way that Vyatta compliments NetScaler and other Citrix technologies in the physical world, Vyatta is a perfect compliment to C3 products and technologies in the virtual world. To show how Vyatta might be used in some cloud scenarios, Citrix has included Vyatta in a couple of its C3 Blueprints.

So, there you have it.

Linux 2.6.30 Kernel Statistics

2009-06-10T11:31:00.001-07:00

Once again, Stephen Hemminger kicks ass and Vyatta makes the list of key contributors to the 2.6.30 kernel: http://lwn.net/Articles/334721/. Thanks, Stephen.

Rumble in the desert

2009-05-22T12:04:00.000-07:00

Tom and I just got back from Interop last night. There was a great panel session that I participated in, titled "Is Routing Undergoing a Mid-Life Crisis?" The other panelists were Juniper and Cisco.

Sean Kerner from InternetNews.com happened to be there in the front row and blogged about the session:

http://blog.internetnews.com/skerner/2009/05/open-source-vs-proprietary-rou.html

The short of it is that I basically stated unequivocally (using props as you'll see in the picture in the blog post) that the emperors have no clothes. While Vyatta doesn't do everything and there are still big portions of the market where Cisco and Juniper have good solutions (high-end carrier routing, for example), if Vyatta can do the job for you (in low to upper-mid-range routing and security, for instance), we're a flat-out better solution. (And over time we'll also get to high-end carrier routing. ;-) )

Anyway, I'm going to try to dig up the audio transcript, but many people came up after the session was over to get a free Vyatta CD and told me that they thought this was the best session of the conference.

Gross Profits = Sweet Savings

2009-05-04T13:00:00.000-07:00

This week, Cisco will be announcing its earnings again. If this is a typical quarter, Cisco will come in with approximately 63% gross profit margin. As we have discussed previously, that's a VERY high gross margin. If you're a Cisco investor, you love 63% gross margins. If you're a Cisco customer, however, you really don't love it; this means that 63 cents of every dollar you spend with Cisco is gross profit.

Never being ones to sit around idle while customers are overpaying, Vyatta decided to do something about it. Today, we announced the "Gross Profit -- Sweet Savings" promotion. All week, we'll be accepting registrations for the promotion. On Wednesday, after Cisco announces its earnings, we'll compute Cisco's gross profit margin from 1Q09 and send out a special discount code via email, good through Friday evening (Pacific time). The discount will depend on Cisco's gross margin. For instance, if Cisco announces a 63% gross margin, customers will pay 63% of list price for a Vyatta subscription (a 37% discount). All the terms and limitations are spelled out on the registration page.

So, register today and look for an email on Wednesday, after Cisco announces its gross profit margin. It's a great way to score a Vyatta subscription for less. If Cisco's investors are cheering, why can't you?

Mickos agrees

2009-04-21T10:07:00.001-07:00

After posting my thoughts on the Oracle/Sun deal yesterday, it was interesting to see former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos's take on the deal: Why Oracle Won't Kill MySQL. Mickos's thoughts parallel my own: Oracle will use MySQL to fend off Microsoft in the low end and provide a way to capture developers and bring them into the Oracle fold.

Oracle Buys Sun

2009-04-20T14:07:00.000-07:00

Well, well. After all the speculation that IBM was buying Sun, it looks like Oracle finally moved the transaction across the finish line.

Previously, it looked like the IBM/Sun deal fell apart over price and possibly strategic fit. Originally, in early April, the Wall St. Journal said the deal was going to be at $9.55. Later, IBM offered $9.40. The Sun board balked at this and IBM subsequently withdrew the offer.

With the latest news, it looks like Oracle agreed to a price of $9.50, cash, bringing the final price to about $7.4B.

Previously, I had said that I didn't get the IBM/Sun deal. With Oracle, the fit seems a lot better, but there are still some questions. The thoughts going through my head are:

From a technology standpoint, the Oracle/Sun deal feels a lot more complimentary than with IBM/Sun. Oracle and Sun have always been strong partners, with Oracle's DB running well on Sun's hardware and software (SPARC/Solaris). Further, Oracle has built a lot of its applications on Java technology.
With the purchase of Sun, Oracle now competes more directly with companies like IBM and HP. In the same way that you could buy DB2, running on AIX or Linux, running on IBM X- or P-Series hardware, you'll now be able to buy Oracle, running on Solaris or Linux, on Sun SPARC or x86. At the performance-oriented, high-end of the database market, this will be a big deal and will probably deliver great long-term performance gains. Oracle can now controls and can tune all levels of the stack.
The only significant overlap between the companies is with the database (Oracle vs. MySQL) and the operating system (Oracle's Linux variant vs. Solaris).
While some people fear for MySQL under Oracle's leadership, I'm not sure that they should automatically worry. The reality is, Oracle was going to lose a lot of database business to MySQL either way, and if not MySQL, it would have been PostgreSQL or even low-end commercial options like Microsoft SQL Server. IMO, it's far better to have MySQL under Oracle's control so that it can be better positioned as an on-ramp to the larger, more lucrative Oracle DB for high-end applications as well as a spoiler for Microsoft. Imagine, for instance, if Oracle embraced MySQL and created a set of tools that allowed developers to work seamlessly with either DB from an application point of view. MySQL could be used during development or at smaller, departmental scales, with minimal conversion to full Oracle licenses as the apps went into production and scaled up. In short, killing MySQL won't save Oracle from the other open source and low-end threats, so if it's smart, it will use MySQL to get developers on the Oracle bandwagon and then keep them there with seamless tools that work on the big DB.
Bigger questions remain for software packages like Open Office. I'm sure that Oracle (and Larry Ellison) would take no greater pleasure than making the office-suite market a no-profit-zone for Microsoft. Currently, MS Office is one of Microsoft's biggest cash-cows, and so cutting into that revenue stream would help starve Microsoft dearly. That said, how much is Oracle willing to invest to do this? Clearly, Open Office is an orthogonal play to the mainline database business, with little tie-in visible at first look. Still, there might be some sort of connection that could be created if Oracle looks hard enough. This would take time, however, and it isn't clear whether Oracle would be willing to carry the development costs. That may mean that Open Office would be sold or spun out into separate entity that would have to find its own revenue stream, much as Netscape did with Mozilla. Killing it outright seems like a waste given that it still does provide competition for Microsoft; the main issue is simply the funding model to keep that going.
Next, there is the question of Solaris vs. Linux. Oracle already has its own Linux variant, a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. My gut tells me that the answer here is "Yes." They'll keep both. Oracle can't afford to drop support for Linux, in the same way that Oracle still runs on HP-UX, AIX, and Solaris. I would expect that Solaris will get the bulk of the performance tuning enhancements, however, with Linux relegated to a back-seat role for those who want to run on commodity hardware and software stacks.
Finally, the biggest question in my head is whether Oracle knows how to, or even wants to, manage a hardware business. Oracle is currently a very profitable software business. Getting into the hardware business will inevitably drag down that overall profitability. There are a couple of options here. They could spin off the hardware business, but that would presume that Oracle doesn't want the hardware business when it buys Sun. That feels like a stretch. Sun doesn't have enough interesting software assets for Oracle to purchase the company solely on that basis, I think; Sun is fundamentally a hardware company. Second, Oracle could focus the hardware business, cutting some of the expensive development. For instance, rather than pursuing continued high-end SPARC development, it could simply focus the Sun hardware divisions on x86-based products. That would cut a lot of development costs yet still keep the company with hardware products. The trade-off would be that Oracle would be limited to whatever performance it could eek out of standard hardware, which might not be where it wants to go. Processors like Niagra might be part of the interest for Oracle, to address high-end applications. Another alternative would be to go the other way and cut all the commodity hardware and only focus on the high-end, more profitable hardware. In the end, whatever the decision, the biggest question is whether Oracle can run a hardware business competently. The company is clearly professional but it has never demonstrated hardware savvy before. Will Sun's hardware engineers remain at Oracle, where hardware is secondary to software? There is a lot that could go wrong or be mismanaged, even with the greatest of intentions.

Am I right or wrong? Who knows. There is a lot of industry speculation today. We'll see as this plays out. The one thing that is clear is that the first half of 2009 has been an interesting time in the IT space. First, Cisco announces UCS and forces an industry-wide realignment, and now Oracle buys Sun and does the same thing. It's only April. By December, the world could be vastly different.

Terminated with Extreme Prejudice

2009-04-20T11:24:00.000-07:00

Well, I had a snafu all last week. The anti-spam robots over at Google decided that this blog met their criteria as a spam blog and decided to disable it. After much clicking on various links over at Blogger to petition for a review, the gods decided that I was worthy and it seems I'm back online again.

After going through this whole experience, here is some feedback for Google/Blogger:

First, let me applaud your efforts to go after spam blogs. Spam is the scourge of the Internet. At the scale at which Google/Blogger operates, the process of detecting spam blogs has to be automated. With any form of automation, some mistakes will sneak through, either false positives or false negatives. I understand that. So, my first thought at being flagged as a spam blog was, "Okay, no biggie. I'll just petition for a review and we'll get this taken care of." Unfortunately, you made the process unnecessarily painful and disruptive.
My biggest beef with Google/Blogger is that the process for requesting a review is a bit of black magic. After the bots categorized my blog as spam, I was sent a single email saying that I had 20 days to request a review, otherwise my blog would be disabled. Naturally, I missed the email and didn't find out about the issue until I logged into Blogger to create a new post. Still, I was at the early part of the review phase before the blog had actually been disabled and there was a clear notice that it would be disabled if I didn't request a review, but missing that first email was a problem as it cut into the 20-day review period.
After logging into Blogger and finding out about being flagged, I immediately requested a review. Again, "No biggie," I thought, "because they have plenty of time to do the review. They'll just pop open a browser, look at the blog, and it will be obvious that it's not spam."
After requesting the review, I got absolutely no feedback from Google/Blogger that the review was happening or even that the request had been received. There was no communication whatsoever. When I logged into Blogger, it would say that a review had been requested on a particular date, but that was it.
After 20 days or whatever, the blog was simply disabled. No warning. No additional emails either right before or after the disabling saying that the blog was about to be disabled or even that it had been disabled. No nothing. I found out that the blog had been disabled from a reader who sent me a message.
Without any communication from Google/Blogger, I was left wondering what happened. Was the review completed, but rejected? Was the request to review ever received? Was there a bug in Google's request or review process? Was in in limbo?
I immediately went online and started checking all the Google help links. There was no help there, other than to say to request a review if your blog got flagged as a spam blog, and one more link to be able to generate another review. There was no appeal procedure, no additional help. In particular, there was no way to reach a real human. The only option to me was to post into Blogger's support group and grouse about things there. From what I can tell, this is a popular past-time, because there were a lot of other people doing the same thing.
What would have been more helpful is a steady stream of update email from Blogger after I requested a review. I would be nice, for instance, to get an email confirming the review request. Then, it would be nice to get a status email periodically (weekly?) saying when the review would be completed. I have no idea whether reviews are completed by humans, or just another bot. I have no idea how long the queue is. In fact, I have no idea whether a review actually took place for my blog during the 20-day grace period before the blog was disabled. If it did, it would have been nice to receive another email stating that the review was complete and the result, whether rejected, approved, or whatever.
In short, COMMUNICATE. There is no substitute for letting people know what is happening, even if you can't give them good news. Also, make your review procedure as transparent as possible. Tell people what to expect ahead of time. Then deliver to that expectation in terms of communications, timeframes, etc.

My main conclusion from this whole thing is that Blogger is a risky deal for corporate blogs where uptime is critical. Bloggers might be better going with a non-Blogger solution, either paid hosted or locally installed (e.g. Wordpress). Google's procedures are designed to achieve a reasonable service level a high levels of scale, but to do that they deliberately deflect all inquiries for a real human (FAQs and forums for support) and rely on automated infrastructure (spam bots). When things have really gone wrong, that simply doesn't work. I walked away from this with a profound sense that my data exists on Blogger at Google's whim, and even if I haven't violated any terms of service, my data can be snuffed out at a moment's notice with little to no appeal possible.

Dear Mr. Schwartz

2009-03-24T12:05:00.000-07:00

Dear Mr. Schwartz,

I was recently reading your blog and found the series of videos you created explaining Sun's strategic direction with respect to systems, software, and open source. Purely from standpoint of presentation, I'll tell you that the video format works well for you. The fireside-chat-like atmosphere comes across quite well.

In listening to your presentation in video 3, I was also excited by your statements about the coming fusion of networking and servers. You specifically said:

As I've said before, general purpose microprocessors and operating systems are now fast enough to eliminate the need for special purpose devices. That means you can build a router out of a server - notice you cannot build a server out of a router, try as hard as you like. The same applies to storage devices.

To demonstrate this point, we now build our entire line of storage systems from general purpose server parts, including Solaris and ZFS, our open source file system. This allows us to innovate in software, where others have to build custom silicon or add cost. We are planning a similar line of networking platforms, based around the silicon and software you can already find in our portfolio.

We believe both the storage and networking industry's proprietary approach, and their gross profit streams, are now open to those us with general purpose platforms. That's good news for customers, and for Sun.

Wow! That's great validation for what Vyatta has been saying for a few years now and I'm glad to see Sun joining our cause. I wholeheartedly agree with your overall analysis. In particular, I agree that if there is to be a fusion of networking and servers (and I think it's now obvious to the industry that it's going to happen), it's definitely going to happen on server hardware, not the other way around. I also agree that the gross profit margin of the proprietary networking vendors is exceedingly high and will be the subject of a forthcoming correction, and that it's good for both customers as well as the new vendors exploiting the benefits of open hardware and software (notably, Vyatta, and perhaps Sun as well as you begin to execute to your strategy).

That said, I think you're probably optimistic that it's going to happen on Solaris or Open Solaris. Sure, you guys have invested a lot into Solaris, and it is a pretty cool system, but the reality is that most everything Solaris has, Linux has also. What few things Solaris has that Linux doesn't (Crossbow and ZFS, for instance) will have rough equivalents in Linux shortly. The converse is not true, however; the main thing that Linux has that Solaris doesn't have is market momentum, and that can't be added to Solaris quickly. Because of this, I believe that the networking systems of the future are going to be built on a Linux foundation, not Solaris, as cool as it is.

Further, these Linux-based networking systems will not be managed like a Unix system, but rather will be built to familiar interface standards for the target audience. Put another way, in order to speed the adoption of this new model, we'll have to deliver more than high performance and a great cost structure; we'll have to deliver these systems with a network-appliance-like interface rather than a traditional Unix-like interface. You cannot simply take Solaris, run a routing stack on top of it, and call it a router, even thought it fundamentally may be quite capable of routing packets well. Any management paradigm that involves a user editing a plethora of configuration files in vi or emacs and then restarting daemons is doomed to a niche position at best because it simply won't fit into the existing management workflows prevalent in the industry today. Because of this, Vyatta has spent a lot of time creating a management paradigm for our system that delivers a standard network appliance look and feel.

So, Mr. Schwartz (and Sun), in summary, welcome to the party. Let's go get 'em.

Regards,

Dave Roberts
Vice President, Strategy and Marketing
Vyatta

PS: Can you give me any confirmation of the IBM buyout rumor floating around? Is it going to happen or not? If you could lay out the rationale from the buyer's side, that would also be interesting for a lot of people. Some of us still don't get it, but I'll admit to not having a seat at IBM's latest corporate strategy executive summit.

Vyatta's contribution

2009-03-24T10:21:00.000-07:00

LWN.net's Jonathan Corbet wrote a nice article last week detailing where the work for the 2.6.29 Linux kernel is coming from. Reports like this get created from time-to-time from the git check-in data for the various patches and contributions that make up the kernel source code.

I'm pleased to report that Vyatta ranked very highly in the latest survey. In particular, Stephen Hemminger, Vyatta's resident kernel wizard extraordinaire, was ranked #4 in total changesets contributed to 2.6.29. Stephen is very involved with the Linux networking subsystem and many of the changes related to changes in the Linux networking APIs and fixing broken drivers to conform with the API changes. Thanks to Stephen's work, Vyatta also comes in at #14 on the list of changesets contributed by corporation. This is fairly significant when you see that the company we were keeping on the list includes mega-Linux supporters like Red Hat, Novell, and IBM, and then other mega-corporations like Oracle, Intel, and Nokia.

Sun and IBM: the rumors continue

2009-03-24T10:11:00.000-07:00

Hmmm... Well, the Sun/IBM deal is looking more and more real. The WSJ reported on Friday that IBM lawyers were on a due-diligence mission, combing through Sun's various contracts to make sure things are up to snuff. That's pretty good confirmation. You simply don't let another company's lawyers (your competitor's lawyers, in fact) go through your contracts unless there is a good reason. Good reasons include acquisition.

IBM buying Sun? I don't get it.

2009-03-19T09:47:00.000-07:00

The entire IT and business press has been atwitter (and Twittering), for the past few days about a rumor that IBM may be making a play for Sun. With Cisco's UCS announcement on Monday that put Cisco into competition with everybody in the IT universe, this IBM/Sun rumor jacked-up the blog-o-sphere to 11 on the frenzy-meter. The Wall St. Journal seems to have been one of the starting points for the rumor, and the headline reads "IBM in Talks to Buy Sun in Bid to Add to Web Heft." That's fairly low-key, really, for what would surely be a tectonic event in IT.

The problem is, almost nobody "gets it." When discussion this around the office and with colleagues in the industry, the basic reaction is, "Why would IBM do that?" Sure, Sun has struggled for a few years following the popping of the overheated tech-bubble in 2000, and it's understandable that they might be looking for a good merger. Sun still has many assets including a large customer base, good technologies (both on the hardware and software side), and a number of good products. So, the seller's motivations are well covered and they actually have things to sell. It's the buyer's motivations that everybody struggles with.

The press is starting to do a double-take, too, as it moves past the news phase to the analysis phase. Dana Gardner at ZDNet makes his opinion plain: "IBM buying Sun Microsystems makes no sense, it's a red herring". Dana thinks Sun might have floated the rumor itself to test the reaction to the idea. Om Malik at GigaOm says "Why Cisco, Not IBM, Should Buy Sun". In short, everybody seems to be scratching their heads.

For me, it just seems like Sun and IBM already compete in so many different areas that it would be hard to integrate Sun into IBM. For instance:

Sun and IBM couldn't be more divergent in terms of corporate culture. That alone makes any integration difficult. Would Sun employees really become long-term IBM employees?
The same thing goes for Sun and IBM customers. While an acquisition of Sun would clearly bring IBM a large customer base, do those customers really want to buy from IBM? Would they stay as customers, or would the acquisition simply precipitate a decision to choose another vendor? I was at HP when it acquired Apollo in 1989. Just following the acquisition, HP had great market share in the workstation market, but many Apollo customers had abandoned HP just a few years later, and most of the market share gains had disappeared. The same thing could happen with IBM.
IBM already has its own versions of most of the products that Sun has. Servers? Check. Operating systems? Yup, more than you can shake a stick at. Processor architectures? Yup, oodles of those, too. Database software? Yup, lots of that. How about Java? Yea, IBM even does well there. Any acquisition of Sun by IBM would force IBM to reconcile and merge all these competing products into the overall portfolio, something that IBM has lots of experience with over the years, but why go through all of that for little other gain?

In short, I just don't get it. I'm thinking that this is more rumor than fact, but I've been wrong about corporate acquisitions before, and there may be something I'm missing.

UCS is DOA?

2009-03-19T09:39:00.000-07:00

Okay, the headline is hyperbole, but it can't be a good sign when you spent millions buying a part of VMware, you announce a galactic data center virtualization marketecture based on VMware, and the VMware users generally don't get it. Alex Barnett has an article at SearchServerVirtualization.com titled "VMware users cast wary eye on Cisco UCS."

The money quote:

When VMware shops look at UCS, they see a platform that exceeds the needs of mainstream IT departments, relies on unproven technologies, requires substantial new investment, and forces dramatic change in the way IT shops purchase and manage their infrastructure.

That can't be good.

Juniper reacts to UCS

2009-03-18T16:22:00.000-07:00

Jim Duffy at Network World has a good article describing the reaction of other vendors to Cisco's UCS announcement, notably Juniper. Unsurprisingly, all the competitors are pointing out the various holes in the all-or-nothing scheme. Rahul Singh, a principle with consultant Pace Harmon, says that he had given input to Cisco to partner on the server portion of the architecture:

“This is not something that Cisco’s done in the past -- trying to get into an already crowded market and displace vendors that people already have a significant amount of investment in and experience with,” Singh says. “It doesn’t make sense but folks at Cisco are used to selling hardware and boxes so it’s almost a logical extension.”

Exactly. But why let things like "sense" get in the way of a grand marketecture, particularly one that delivers a whopping 15 to 20 percent savings in return for your complete future product loyalty?

Data Center Love Fest

2009-03-18T16:17:00.000-07:00

Ben Worthen at the Wall St. Journal has an interesting take on the Cisco UCS announcement. Summary: heavy on puffery and mutual congratulation between the members of the partner cabal, but light on specifics like, you know, pricing.

Selling your data center soul for 20 percent?

2009-03-17T15:22:00.000-07:00

I almost had another "spray coffee out the nose" experience this morning when reviewing the industry news headlines. Yesterday, Cisco managed to get into competition with just about everybody in the IT universe. "Cisco Systems doesn't seem to know how to color inside the lines," wrote Matt Asay this morning. What did Cisco do? Well, it announced it's "Unified Computing System" (UCS) that basically puts it into competition with IBM, HP, Dell, EMC, NetApp, Citrix, and everybody else that plays in the enterprise and service provider data center. Craig Matsumoto at Light Reading does a good job on the various details.

"What the hell is a UCS?" you ask. Well, according to Cisco, it's, "the next-generation data center platform." It's "designed to improve IT responsiveness to rapidly changing business demands," and it "accelerates the delivery of new services simply, reliably, and securely, through end-to-end provisioning and migration support for both virtualized and non-virtualized systems." In short, it's an all-singing, all-dancing integrated mash-up of networking, compute, and storage widgets, all of which plug into nice rack-mountable chassis with little Cisco logos on them. Cisco says that using UCS, you'll be able to "unify, simplify, and amplify," er... something.

This is the biggest, boldest data center marketecture the world has ever seen. It's chock-full of buzz-word compliant marketing phrases and it's 100 percent certified politically correct. The Cisco marketing videos are stuffed with beautiful people who look really happy about reducing their cholesterol rating and amplifying, er..., whatever it is that UCS amplifies. Seriously, I didn't see one ugly or unhappy person in the videos.

In short, wow, what could go wrong...?

In listening to some of the other videos, I was struck that Cisco really has thought this thing through. For instance, in a second video, Mark Fulgham, Vice President of Marketing for Cisco said:

We all have to recognize that the language of business is money. And so with that in mind, we have consciously created some really empowering TCOs here. One that addresses a 20 percent total cost of ownership reduction in the area of facilities, which really has a 10 - 15 year capitalization cycle. So this is a very dramatic contribution to the bottom line. Secondarily, we are also looking at a 15 percent reduction in the actual platform. So again, very competitive and actual good table stakes in being able to respond to data center virtualization. Last but not least, we also see this as an opportunity to allow companies to rethink their organizational models, so that they are able to bring together more effective, efficient, and responsive IT organizations to address the just-in-time as opposed to just-in-case provisioning models that IT has today.

Just listen to that. "We have consciously created some really empowering TCOs here." Like wow, they really spent time on this. It was conscious; definitely not unconscious. The "TCOs" are really "empowering." Between the "empowering TCOs," the "amplifying," and the good looking people in the videos, you just know this is going to be good.

According to Fulgham, speaking the language of business, which is money, this whole thing will shave 20 percent off your facilities costs and they are "looking at" a 15 percent reduction in the "actual platform" (translation: all the hardware and software you're going to have to buy from Cisco to get you this).

So, my first reaction is how, um..., underwhelming it is.

Honestly, is that it? All these big chassis and virtualization and unified, integrated, automated everything and you can only give me a TCO reduction of 20 percent on my data center facilities? Dang, everybody else in the data center rearchitecture and virtualization business have shown TCOs much higher then this when companies are really ready to go whole-hog down the path. And that's for mixed equipment from multiple vendors. How is it that Cisco wants to integrate everything and can only show small double-digit reductions like this? (Answer: Maybe this stuff is exorbitantly priced.) A reduction of 20 percent might be "empowering," but it's hardly impressive. I wouldn't know; I haven't ever really felt empowered from a TCO.

Secondly, only a 15 percent reduction in the cost of the "platform??" Let me get this straight... Cisco can't save me more than 15 percent after completely rearchitecting my data center and fork-lift upgrading all my current gear to a Cisco UCS platform? That's staggering. Hell, most people could shave 15 percent off the cost of their data center hardware and software by rolling their current vendors for slightly better discounts, particularly during this macro economic climate.

Thirdly, just what the hell does, "very competitive and actual good table stakes in being able to respond to data center virtualization," mean?? What kind of mush-mouth, marketing double-talk is that? Is anyone out there "responding to data center virtualization?" Anyone? Anyone? Beuller?

"Last but not least," Cisco sees the adoption of UCS as an "opportunity to allow companies to rethink their organizational models." It's not a problem, you see, that UCS will cut across every single operating team in your organization and throw your organizational structure is a mass of tangled string; rather, it's an "opportunity." Wow, how nice of Cisco to give everybody this opportunity. I mean, I'm sure that everybody was sitting here in a down economy, with budgets getting cut across the board, having to make all manner of hard decisions, and negotiating like crazy with vendors to make all the numbers add up at the end of the day, thinking to themselves, "You know what I really need right now...? The 'opportunity' to rethink my whole organization model. Yea, that's it." Seems like Fulgham comes from the "it's not a bug, it's a feature" school of marketing. But who can blame him with all the "amplification" in the air? Certainly, not I; it's enough to give one a case of the vapours.

Don't just take my word for all this, it's straight from the lips of Cisco. Watch the video.

Okay, enough of the sarcasm. Here's the real-world translation for all you folks that haven't lived through grand-scale marketectures before and don't speak the lingo:

In return for a fork-lift upgrade of your whole data center infrastructure (networking, servers, and storage) to a Cisco UCS, you'll (maybe) see a 20 percent reduction in facilities costs and (maybe) a 15 percent reduction in "platform" costs. Yes, you'll have to throw out everything you have today to get these staggering "benefits," but you can rebuy everything from Cisco again with a 15 percent savings. In return for all this, which you could probably get sticking with your current best-of-breed architecture and negotiating a bit harder in this down economy, you make the Faustian bargain of locking yourself into racks and racks of single-vendor (plus a small cabal of "partners") proprietary gear as far the eye can see. Oh, but I almost forgot--you also have the "opportunity" to completely "rethink" your IT organization. And wait, they'll also throw in a free set of Ginsu knives...

All this is brought to you by the same people that today sell you 1-port Fast Ethernet cards for $639 (not Gigabit Ethernet, mind you!) and 512 MB of memory for $2447. Now, maybe it's just me, but when Cisco can't find more than 15 to 20 percent savings in their own marketing announcement and they have a history of selling $639 Fast Ethernet cards, call me just a little skeptical that I'm not going to see all the "amplification" that I have been promised, er..., whatever that means.

What's the value of choice and avoiding vendor lock-in? Would you really sell your data center soul for 15 to 20 percent?

The Evolution of the Router

2009-02-18T10:26:00.000-08:00

From the first IMPs to Fuzzballs to the AGS to Layer 3 switches to Juniper to Vyatta to routers in space, Network World's "Evolution of the Router" slide show tells it all. It's interesting that routing was started on standard hardware platforms early in its evolution. Vyatta is simply leveraging today's more modern standard hardware for the same purpose. The circle is complete, so to speak.

And Cisco's profit margin is...

2009-02-04T15:56:00.000-08:00

Cisco announced earnings today. You can read the details in the Cisco press release or in press articles summarizing the data presented in the earnings call. What I found interesting was the Cisco gross profit margin: 63% (= $5723M / $9089M).

We have pointed out previously the fact that Cisco has one of the highest gross profit margins the world, other than software companies which have essentially zero cost of goods sold. The profit margin is obscenely high, in fact. High to the point that Exxon-Mobile and other oil companies would be drawn and quartered if they had profit margins that high (about 40% for Exxon in the quarter ending Sept 2008).

So, 63 cents of every dollar that customers paid Cisco was gross profit on the sale last quarter. People will rightly point out that Cisco still had to pay salaries, taxes, and other expenses with that money. But Exxon-Mobile had to do the same thing with only 40 cents of every dollar paid to it, and it was similar with every other company with a lower gross profit margin.

If you ever wondered if Cisco is charging high prices, the latest numbers filed with the SEC provide yet another data point.

Cores, cores, cores...

2009-02-02T10:30:00.000-08:00

Andy Patrizio wrote a nice story for internetnews.com last week, titled "Gartner: Too Many Chips Spoil the Server". The article discusses the struggle for software to make use of all the parallelism that is on the cusp of being delivered by the CPU crowd in the form of massive multicore.

Patrizio writes:

With the number of chips per server and cores per chip increasing, future generations of servers may end up with way more processing power than the computer could possibly utilize, even under virtualization, Gartner has found. The research firm issued a report on the issue earlier this week.

The article then goes on to detail the fact that today's software systems might have trouble scaling in a massively multicore environment. Because of this, total processor utilization of all the CPUs in a system may start to drop.

Simply, programmers have relied on the chip boys to delivering chips that execute a single instruction stream faster and faster, from the 1980s up through 2005 or so. They wrote linear code and the chips simply executed that instruction stream faster and faster. These days, the chip boys are reneging on that "promise" and are having to go parallel. While Moore's Law is still in effect (transistor count keeps doubling), we're finding it harder and harder to push up the clock speeds. The result is that everything is going multicore in a big way, and the software folks haven't figured out how to deal with this, yet. The challenge is to find and exploit the parallelism in the software and make use of all the cores. But there is a lot of existing code that doesn't work this way and the tools and techniques for doing this easily or automatically are primitive today.

From Vyatta's point of view, this multicore explosion is a fine development. There are some problems that are naturally parallel; networking is one of them. While you have to make sure that the overall system is balanced to be able to feed the processor (the other data paths have to be fast enough to deliver data when needed), the more processing cores, the better. There are relatively few data dependencies in networking. There are some, particularly for stateful flow tracking, but those dependencies exist temporally, between packets in the same flow; each flow can typically be processed independently of the others.

What this means is that you can expect Vyatta to get better and better in the world of multi-core. And we won't have to re-engineer things greatly to take advantage of this. Unlike software for other applications, networking is in the "sweet spot" for where the world is headed.

Bring on the cores!

Nortel: Perspective Drives Feelings

2009-01-30T11:38:00.001-08:00

A couple weeks ago, Brad Reese wrote a blog entry over at Network World that talked about the Nortel bankruptcy. In response, he got a bunch of comments from ex-Nortel employees discussing the reasons for Nortel's failure. Brad even quoted a couple of paragraphs from my previous blog posting on the subject. Last evening, Brad posted a roundup of some of the comments to his previous posting (including my quotes again).

What strikes me about the comments posted to Brad's original blog entry, as well as the comments I have received on my posting are that a lot of how you feel about this whole thing depends on your history with the company. There is a lot of "he said, she said" going on between old-line Nortel people and folks that came to Nortel through the Bay Networks acquisition.

If you were an old-line Nortel guy, then it's clear that the Bay Networks acquisition was the start of the screw-up. If you were a Bay Networks guy, then you probably feel that Nortel was clueless and didn't learn anything from the acquisition. Almost by definition, we're conditioned to think that the "home team" is better than the "visiting team," even when we're all supposed to be on the same team.

Fortunately for me, I was neither a career Nortel or Bay employee. I had only been at Bay for year before Nortel bought Bay. Because I was a relative newcomer to both companies, I think I have a better perspective on both the strengths and weaknesses than many other people. In this case, I think my perspective provides a distance necessary to make some objective judgements about the situation. That said, I'm just one person with one view. Everybody is entitled to their own.

So, did Bay screw up Nortel, or did Nortel screw up Bay? Short answer: Yes. The longer answer is more complicated.

When I got acquired into Bay, the company was pretty screwed up. Not many people know this, but when Bay was created from the merger of Synoptics and Wellfleet in the mid 1990s, the combined entity was actually larger than Cisco in terms of revenue. The company had a great set of Ethernet hubs, was leading in terms of the new technology of Ethernet switching, and a long-established line of excellent routers. In short, Bay took two great companies and jammed them together in what should have been an awesome company. Why did it work out that Cisco is thriving and Bay got bought out and Nortel then filed Chapter 11?

The problem, again from my perspective arriving at the company years later, was that the companies merged rather than one acquiring another. In talking with people who lived through it on both sides, this seems to be the root of all the other issues. The leadership of the companies went out of their way to try to make people feel that neither company had "conquered" the other. The problem with that was that it tied the decision-making process in knots. The leadership set up such a system of power sharing that nobody had any power to get anything done without another group being able to torpedo things. So, everybody started torpedoing everything in retaliation to being torpedoed themselves. At a macro level, almost all new product development ground to a halt because nobody could get enough critical mass to move the ball forward. Projects would start and then get repeatedly canceled.

This problem particularly devastated the Wellfleet product lines. Synoptics was very much bought into the idea that Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) was THE NEXT BIG THING. ATM, it was said, would obsolete Ethernet and obsolete routing. While Synoptics wasn't the only company to believe this, they made big bets in this direction. Anybody advancing a project plan that focused on advancing the company's Ethernet switching (in which, again, Synoptics was leading) or routing product lines was often doomed to failure as budget was redirected to work on ATM-related projects. I talked with multiple Wellfleet engineers who had worked on five or six projects since being part of Bay, all of which had fallen victim to the budget redirection axe and been canceled in favor of "ATM will make that obsolete" thinking. But it wasn't just Wellfleet people. I met many Synoptics engineers trying to push forward Ethernet switching projects that suffered the same thing.

So, when I got to Bay, you had a bunch of fairly talented, but bitter people, all mad at each other, and almost no new product development coming to fruition. The sales force was desperate for something, anything new that it could sell.

During that same period, Cisco took a more pragmatic approach. It placed bets on each of these technologies, building what it could and signing OEM relationships to fill in the gaps. The Cisco marketing organization provided the "marketecture" that made everything look seamless and integrated, at least in the Powerpoint slide decks that were presented to customers in the Executive Briefing Centers ("...and of course all these various products run IOS..."). Then, Cisco watched the market and doubled-down on the market segments that were really growing. While Bay dallied with the notion that ATM was the one network to rule them all ("...and in the darkness bind them..."), Cisco quickly figured out that ATM wasn't selling and Ethernet switching and IP routing were. Appropriate projects were created to drive those product lines forward. Investments were made and profits ensued.

Now, Nortel was equally screwed up, but in a different way. Nortel was a great example of a company that did really well in the 1980s but didn't react to the way the world was moving in the 1990s. The company built great phone systems, both for private businesses (Meridian) as well as telcos (DMS). And when I say that they built them, they really did. They developed their own CPUs, wrote their own operating systems, manufactured all the boards and sheet metal and whatnot. This was old-line, vertically integrated manufacturing at its best. And it carried all the costs associated with such.

Further, Nortel really understood the voice market of the 1980s when things were still dominated by the larger telcos, many still nationalized around the world. These customers moved slowly. Products were installed and then expected to run for a decade or more, with nothing but backward-compatible upgrades provided during that time. Margins were very high. Everything was wonderfully over-engineered to deliver exceptional quality. The sales process was optimized to call on either large telcos (Bell Canada or the US Baby Bells) or work through oodles of small resellers peddling PBX systems for SMBs. This latter channel was highly optimized for installation and maintenance by unskilled labor. The rate of change was slow. In short, you built a highly engineered product, expected to be indestructable for a decade or more, and you leveraged your relationships to incrementally sell more upgrades into accounts that you won. You charged an arm and a leg for what you delivered, and it was very profitable. In that world, Nortel was very good.

Unfortunately, in the mid-1990s, the world changed. Nortel was woefully unprepared for the rise of datacom (not telecom), the Internet, and run-and-gun IT. In this environment, Nortel's slow-moving, vertically integrated development model fell apart. Just as the "Bell heads" lost out to the "Net heads" in the larger networking game, Nortel found itself on the diminishing side of the same war at the supplier level. In short, the world was going packet, and the packet world consumed and threw away more technology at a more rapid pace than Nortel had ever seen before.

In the mid-1990's, Nortel formed some relationships with Cabletron Systems in order to address packet-oriented product requirements. But this was not enough. John Roth, Nortel's CEO, knew that he needed a massive change that the corporate DNA level. Perhaps it was possible for a "Bell head" to morph into a "Net head," thought Roth, but it's obviously going to take longer than we have time for. Roth's decision to buy Bay was predicated on belief that Bay would infuse Nortel with a lot of good "Net head" DNA quickly. In this, I think Roth made a reasonable decision. Bay was still the #2 company in data, and could be afforded by Nortel at the time. You play the cards you're dealt, and in this respect Roth made a good move.

The problems came in trying to put it all together. Without an overarching vision of exactly how this merger of telecom and datacom companies was supposed to function, the whole thing got executed in a patchwork of small pieces. Roth knew he needed to shift the company, but couldn't articulate in detail to exactly where he was shifting. So everybody made their own best guess and the merged Nortel was the result.

Increasingly, the corporate marketing got more and more bland as the company tried to avoid taking a stand on anything to avoid angering a constituency. You couldn't tell new Meridian PBX customers that were expecting decade-long support that VoIP was the future and they had just bought an Edsel. You couldn't tell your channel partners that they had to understand both voice and data or they would be kicked out of the program. Etc. And so rather than anybody actually changing anything, Nortel operated like a slightly less disfunctional version of Bay, with everybody doing their own thing, with less sniping at each other. The cash generated by the optical business allowed people to avoid making the hard decisions about where the company was headed and allowed senior management to go to customers with the idea that Nortel made anything and everything, all equally well.

So, as a result, you have post-Chapter 11 comments like these from multiple points of view:

Nortel spin: "Bay was checkmated by Cisco, and for some strange and sad reason Nortel decided to follow Bay's losing managers and strategy, turning a once strong and proud company into an also-ran in the enterprise market." -- Really? Nortel followed Bay's strategy? All I knew was that Nortel kept trying to kill my product line. A product line that has since delivered billions in revenue to Nortel.
Nortel spin: "With the influx of Enterprise talent that were focused on short-term relationships, eventually everything went toward that strategy and away from strong, long-term relationships. As part of short term focused strategy, they outsourced their manufacturing, development and systematically "outsourced" of all of their valuable assets." So building everything from silicon on up is a good idea in an era when contract manufacturing works so well? A valuable asset?
Bay spin: "The Bay Networks aquisition was one of the best buys out of Roth's outrageous spending spree. The people were dynamic and products leading edge, providing a real alternative to Cisco in the enterprise space...which many customers loved." Bay's people were not dynamic and products leading edge. Certainly, there were good people and some good products, but many good people left Bay way before Nortel bought them because Bay was such a disaster, and many product lines had stagnated years earlier. Bay's people were tired and cranky, having put up with a bunch of internal crap for years, and the products were tired even if they had been market-leading when they were introduced. Things were turning around, but it wasn't all sunlight and roses.
Bay spin: "It was always perceived that Management was tinkering in product development as well. A product development life cycle would start, and then half way through be killed, and then re-spun. There was about 3 false starts on a IPT platform before one was actually released. Because of this, Nortel trailed Cisco and Avaya, and was never able to catch up." Right, not like those Bay engineers that had six projects canceled in as many years at Bay and literally never saw their hard work ship to customers in any form. Maybe Nortel did adopt some of Bay's failing strategies.

The point here isn't to suggest that anybody's recollections are wrong. This is simply a great example of the parable of the blind men with the elephant. We all saw a slice of the whole and form our judgements about blame based on our past history and our narrow vantage point. I assure you that there is more than enough blame to go around.

In any case, thanks Brad for pulling together multiple viewpoints. While we all can disagree about the cause, the fact that Nortel is now in Chapter 11 is fairly indisputable.

The Decline and Fall of Nortel Networks

2009-01-21T13:03:00.000-08:00

The industry is still digesting the half-surprising bankruptcy of Nortel last week. Last week, I put together my own posting working through the history from what I could remember. Today, Craig Matsumoto at Light Reading wrote a great article that chronicles the whole mess using the various Light Reading stories about Nortel from 2000 through to the present. It's very well done and provides a lot of the context and actual news as it was written that my original blog post just touched on. If you're interested in how Nortel got here, have a read.

Your Vyatta system just got cheaper

2009-01-19T12:18:00.000-08:00

So Cnet is reporting that Intel just cut prices on some CPUs by as much as 48 percent. That means your next Vyatta system just got cheaper, or more powerful for the same cost. You pick. Welcome to the world of Moore's Law Economics™. With Vyatta, you're now riding the ecosystem cost curve, not the proprietary cost curve.

Cisco could not be reached for comment.

Creating a Session Border Controller with Vyatta

2009-01-16T14:35:00.000-08:00

Earlier this month, Michael Picher created a nice document describing how to create a SIP Session Border Controller (SBC) using Vyatta. You can find his write-up here: Install OpenSBC on Vyatta Firewall

Comparing Bubbles

2009-01-15T17:00:00.000-08:00

The Economist has a good article today that talks about the current recession and financial industry bubble. Specifically, the article talks about how tech firms might fare over the next year or two and how the current bubble differs markedly from the previous tech bubble.

This time things are not yet that bad—and are unlikely to become so. In spite of the string of bad news, some forecasters still expect global IT spending to grow this year [emphasis mine], at least when you allow for currency fluctuations. According to Forrester Research, a market-research firm, technology purchases will decline by 3% in 2009 when counted in dollars (see chart). But the dollar’s relative strength weighs heavily on the results of American firms by devaluing their foreign revenues. When measured in a basket of local currencies, weighted for each region’s share of the global IT market, Andrew Bartels of Forrester expects an increase of 3%.

There are many reasons why spending is more robust than during the last downturn. For a start, the IT market has become more global. Between 2003 and 2008, developed countries’ share of IT spending fell from 85% to 76%, according to the OECD’s recently published Information Technology Outlook. Demand from China and India is expected to continue to grow despite the gloomy economic outlook.

More importantly, last time around the IT industry was not the victim of an economic crisis, but its cause, says Graham Vickery, author of the OECD report. For years companies had spent far too much on technology, buying more e-commerce software than they could ever hope to use, for example. When the bubble burst they abruptly cut spending. Today IT departments are much less prone to wasting money. In fact, says Mark Raskino of Gartner, another market-research firm, most are quite lean. Further cuts in technology budgets would be difficult, he argues, since they would require many firms to reorganise themselves first. “IT is certainly not sacrosanct, but fairly low on the list of things to cut,” he says.

This is an important point. While the financial industry is reeling from the current crisis, the tech industry is tightening its belt and moving on. Obviously, the current recession will affect everybody, worldwide, but there is much reason to believe that the devastating catastrophe of 2001 and 2002 that claimed many tech companies won't occur the same way again. Will there be casualties? Yes, you bet, but not like in 2001 and 2002 where whole market segments evaporated over night (everybody say "optical networking").

The article goes on to say:

In many ways the previous IT downturn marked the industry’s coming of age. In its wake, the industry was no longer mainly about “hot” new technologies that made maximal use of Moore’s law, which holds that roughly twice as much processing power is available at a given price every 18 months. Firms have since started to opt more for good-enough “cold” wares, which save them money and allow for more flexibility: commodity hardware, open-source software such as the Linux operating system and programs accessed over the internet, or “software as a service” (SaaS).

The crisis will only speed up this shift, not least because many of the cold technologies have themselves become more mature. SaaS and other computing services supplied online, and collectively called “cloud computing”, have become better and more widespread. In November Salesforce.com, the largest SaaS firm, beat analysts’ expectations, reporting sharply growing revenues and profits.

And open-source software has long since moved beyond Linux. All kinds of enterprise software is now available in this form, which in most cases means that firms pay for maintenance services, but that the programs are free. This business model already seems to be benefiting from the downturn. Revenues at Alfresco, which makes software that helps manage web content, for instance, have tripled in the last quarter, according to Mr Asay.

In short, this article lays out a great case for everything we have been saying at Vyatta. How can firms continue to justify overspending with Cisco, giving it 64% gross margins, when other options exist that deliver better performance for less? Increasingly, they aren't trying to justify it; they're simply adopting Vyatta.

Nortel: In Rememberance

2009-01-15T12:51:00.000-08:00

Well, as might be imagined after yesterday's semi-shocking news that Nortel was filing Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the news stories are flying today about what this all means to the telecom industry.

Craig Matsumoto at Light Reading gets the "picture is worth 1000 words" award.

Jim Duffy at Network World reports that, unsurprisingly, competitors are already trying to chew what's left of the flesh off Nortel's "I'm not dead yet" corpse.

As a former Nortel employee, I can tell you that this was both surprising and not at the same time. The following is my analysis of things, having been at the company during its heyday but now from the outside looking in.

By way of background, I was with a small startup company, Rapid City, that got purchased by Bay Networks in 1997. Bay was then purchased by Nortel in 1998. Along the way, I was promoted to VP of product management for the enterprise switching group at Nortel. If you're familiar with the 8600 L3 switching platform, that came to become the core of the business we built, though I left just after the product shipped into the market in mid-2000, right before Nortel purchased Alteon Web Systems for $7.8B and the bubble burst.

In the telecom growth spurt of the late 1990s, Nortel was one of the fastest growing companies and stocks in the world. They were very well positioned to ride the optical networking hype wave that accompanied the Internet revolution and the overall building of the current worldwide network. Unlike many companies of that era, there really was a "there there." The company had real products, smart engineers, and in many cases very good technology. What they didn't have was customers with non-hyped business models and overall good business and marketing sense. In short, the bubble caught them, hook, line, and sinker.

Unfortunately, the company got very off-balance as it grew. It was very clear when I was there that anybody who wanted a long term career in Nortel had to be associated with the carrier group, preferably an optical product line. That was where all the momentum was within the company. If you were an employee working on other things (enterprise products in my case), it was clear that you weren't going to get any of the investment, attention, or promotions. In contrast, the optical management teams were masters of the universe.

When the bubble burst in late 2000/early 2001, the company's "core businesses" were smack in the middle of the action (or sudden lack of action, really). With the chair suddenly pulled out from under it, Nortel could not retrench quickly enough. They had allowed many of their other businesses to decay as the company got tunnel vision with all-things-optical, and there was nothing to fall back on. This was not the beginning of the end, but rather the end of the beginning, however.

If the company had had good leadership at that point, it could have gone through the painful process of rebuilding itself and survived. Products and product lines come and go, but good companies survive the dips and swings in the market. Unfortunately, Nortel didn't have the top-level DNA necessary at that point to do what was required and move the company forward. Many of the people who were in senior leadership roles at that point had simply been lucky to be at the right place at the right time during the bubble and found themselves unable to cope when the formerly rising tide stopped lifting all boats and instead started to recede. All big companies suffer this same problem, but Nortel suffered particularly hard because its success in the late 1990s had been so sudden and great.

The real trouble, the beginning of the end, started when accounting problems cropped up in 2002 and the company was not able to quickly move past them. They went through a couple of CEOs and CFOs during that time, some of whom later had criminal charges filed against them. While it would be hard to say that Nortel was fully "cooking the books," somebody at Nortel was clearly "warming them in the microwave." During the same time period when Enron, Tyco, and Worldcom were exploding, it was simply unacceptable to any investor and the company's stock continued to move downward as the scandal dragged on and on.

Just when you figured it would end, that Nortel would restate their earnings, and that they could get back to making good products again, instead the company would issue another press release saying that the final restatements were being delayed and there might be more bad news coming. This continued literally for years and was a constant drag on the company.

The constant bad news turned into a general malaise during this period. Instead of the vibrant company Nortel had been in the late 1990s, it became a dead man walking. The bad news affected customer confidence in the company, which led to even lower sales than they would have had in the post-bubble period, which led to layoffs and corporate debt to manage the finances, all of which in turn led to employee dissatisfaction, and attrition of good people.

So, here we are in 2009 and the chickens finally came home to roost. Just yesterday, Nortel filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the US (and the equivalent in Canada). The luster came off Nortel back in 2001 and it's been a slow decline ever since. With the overall worldwide macro economy now faltering, Nortel simply couldn't balance the books any longer. Revenues were declining, the debt load was high, and there was very little that they could sell off that would raise cash, in spite of trying.

To be fair to Nortel, this really isn't the end. Chapter 11 bankruptcy simply protects a company from its creditors while it restructures itself under the watchful eye of the court to try to find a way to dig itself out of a very big hole. Some companies have been through Chapter 11 multiple times and are still operating (Continental Airlines springs to mind). Obviously, Nortel has a fairly traumatic future in front of it, but there is a chance that it will come back from this. If so, my own feeling is that it will be years before it finds it stride again.

If there's a lesson in this sad story for people, it's that good companies get through bad news fast. While every company has ups and downs, the good ones know how to manage through periods of bad news and do their best to get things behind them quickly. Nortel, in contrast, managed itself slowly into mediocrity.

Was everything at Nortel bad? No, certainly not. Nortel had many bright spots over the years, and I met some very talented people that I respect greatly from among the oldline (non-Bay Networks) employees. In short, there was real talent there. If there was a failure at Nortel, it was the leadership who didn't know how to handle the transition.

At this point, let me give some props to John Chambers over at Cisco. While Vyatta and Cisco obviously have big differences of opinion about how the networking market will evolve in the future, I'll say that the Cisco management team, led by Chambers, didn't fall into the same pot-holes as did Nortel following the bubble. Fundamentally, Cisco was better positioned than Nortel when the bubble burst. It was not as dependent on the optical networking product lines (because it was behind, a Nortel employee might say) and it was on the right side of the VoIP transition, with no legacy business to defend and migrate (Meridian). Still, Cisco out-executed Nortel through the post-bubble era. Cisco infiltrated Nortel's customer base, picked off key Nortel employees, and grew revenue even as Nortel declined. When the market gave them lemons, Cisco made lemonade. In my opinion, the credit for this rests with squarely with Chambers and his management team.

One question the networking pundits are starting to ask is, "Who's next?" Alcatel-Lucent has been troubled in recent years and has been laying off employees. Cisco is certainly not invincible and many of the top management team who steered the company through the post-tech-bubble period have left in recent years. Could another mega-networking company become a victim? Quite possibly, says I.

The current global recession will test everybody, I think, and we'll see who is strong enough to make it. Certainly, at Vyatta we think we'll continue to grow. While recessions aren't fun, it sometimes takes a large shock to the system to get people to reevaluate their behavior. In the same way that Cisco was on the right side of the transition to VoIP, Vyatta believes we're on the right side of the coming commoditization of networking.

While the future is never certain, Vyatta won't be filing Chapter 11 ourselves this week.

Nice Vyatta BGP tutorial

2009-01-15T10:39:00.001-08:00

There is a nice tutorial on how to setup BGP on Vyatta over at Debuntu.org: How-To: Setting up BGP on Vyatta.

Battle of the Brands

2009-01-05T10:09:00.000-08:00

Matt Asay wrote a nice little blog post about Vyatta last week, Vyatta: Beating Cisco with open networks. The only bummer with the post was that it arrived on January 2 and many people probably didn't see it because of the holiday season. Matt's post references a TechTarget article by Pam Derringer and pulls a quote from analyst Tony Iams from Pam's article:

Tony Iams, an analyst with Rye Brook, N.Y.-based Ideas International, said the networking market continues to grow, but Vyatta faces a challenge because Cisco has such a strong brand name, and companies are reluctant to gamble with networks because they are so critical to operations.

"Open source can be disruptive with a cheaper product," Iams said. "But Vyatta has to overcome a lot of skepticism and reassure customers that they aren't sacrificing quality."

My reaction to Tony's statement is, yes, of course. You aren't telling me anything really new. Customers always generally favor tried and true products over new and untested products. Right up until the time that they don't and the new becomes the tried and true product and the old product goes the way of the dinosaur. This is simply the way that new products and ideas come to market and it happens over and over again.

And this quote, almost verbatim, is always trotted out by analysts when they are asked to comment on a new company. It's an old saw in the analyst business, as safe and solid as motherhood and apple pie. You can't go wrong with it, because it's so uncontroversial as to be almost content-free. I don't fault Tony for using it, any other analyst would have said the same thing, but it's simply FUD without any hard evidence.

To prove the point, let's take this same quote, run in through the Wayback Machine, and see what it sounds like in other contexts:

John Doe, an analyst with New York-based, Big Analysis, Inc., said the computer market continues to grow, but Microsoft faces a challenge because IBM has such a strong brand name, and companies are reluctant to gamble with computers and operating systems because they are so critical to operations.

"Windows can be disruptive with a cheaper product," Doe said. "But Microsoft has to overcome a lot of skepticism and reassure customers that they aren't sacrificing quality."

How about this one:

Jane Doe, an analyst with Conneticut-based, Amazing Insight, said the PBX market continues to grow, but Cisco faces a challenge because Lucent has such a strong brand name, and companies are reluctant to gamble with voice networks because they are so critical to operations.

"VoIP can be disruptive with a cheaper product," Doe said. "But Cisco has to overcome a lot of skepticism and reassure customers that they aren't sacrificing quality."

Or maybe this one:

Fred Doe, an analyst with San Jose-based, Total Future Clarity, said the Unix market continues to grow, but Red Hat faces a challenge because Sun has such a strong brand name, and companies are reluctant to gamble with servers because they are so critical to operations.

"Linux can be disruptive with a cheaper product," Doe said. "But Red Hat has to overcome a lot of skepticism and reassure customers that they aren't sacrificing quality."

See what I mean? This quote appears all the time, for all new companies. It's true, but it doesn't provide any insight.

Matt's posting concludes but giving a few ways that Vyatta can help build it's brand, and they're all good suggestions that we're already working on. If you're a Vyatta customer, you also know that what the Vyatta brand means to you and how conscious we are about making sure our customers are satisfied with what we deliver. In fact, four out of five customers say that we provide better service than the big name networking companies. And that fifth customer, the odd-man out? He says we provide about the same level of service.

So, are you sacrificing anything going with Vyatta? Our current customers say no. If anything, you're getting more. Does Vyatta have to convince even more people that we can do the job? Yes. Should you buy open source out of a sense of charity, based purely on religious commitment to open source ideals, eschewing pragmatism and business sense? Of course not. Vyatta has to compete and demonstrate that it can meet real business needs. Fortunately, we are. And you in today's environment you need to ask yourself whether you'd rather be sending your money to a company with one of the highest gross profit margins in the business or to a new company that can deliver what you need for a lot less.

Cisco announces new technique for same ol' proprietary lock-in

2008-12-19T09:07:00.000-08:00

This item came to me this morning by way of a Vyatta user. It appears that Cisco will no longer support IPSec termination between the ASA and 3rd party devices. Yes, they'll still support IPSec. But not interoperability.

Cisco has long been the king of non-interoperable, proprietary protocols such as EIGRP, HSRP, Fast Etherchannel, etc. Typically, a standard, alternative protocol ends up being developed that solves similar problems and allows multi-vendor interoperability (OSPF, VRRP, 803.3ad, etc.). And the market typically forces Cisco to implement those standard protocols, though Cisco will always recommend installing the proprietary protocols when it comes to implementation time in order to lock-in customers and force them to pay its prices.

This behavior takes the cake, however. Cisco is essentially saying, "Yea, the product implements a standard VPN protocol, but we won't actually guarantee that or work with you to resolve any problems if you try to use that protocol with a 3rd party product. We'll only support you if you're using that standard protocol between two proprietary Cisco devices." Simply. Staggering. Now you can have all the lock-in of a proprietary protocol when you use a standard protocol. Congratulations, Cisco users.

For fun, let's project a couple of years into the future when this policy takes wider hold at Cisco. These are statements you can expect to hear from the Networking Experts™:

"Yes, we implement Ethernet, but we'll only support you when you use it between Cisco devices."
"Yes, we implement BGP, but we'll only support you when you use it between Cisco devices."
"Yes, we implement the forwarding of IP datagrams, but we'll only support you if those datagrams have not been previously forwarded by a 3rd party product by the time they reach our product."
"Yes, we implement SIP for VoIP traffic, but we'll only support you if it originates from a Cisco phone."

At Vyatta, we take interoperability seriously. We're not so arrogant as to think your entire network will only consist of Vyatta products. We'll actually help our products work with others in your network. In short, we're here to serve you, the user. Try Vyatta and enjoy IPSec interoperability with a multitude of other vendors. We can't guarantee that we'll work with every other vendor, but we can guarantee that we'll try, and we can guarantee that we'll work with more than just ourselves.

Update: It looks like Cisco got a bunch of bad press over this and edited its documentation. As adimcev points out in the comments, it now says, "Note: The ASA supports LAN-to-LAN IPsec connections with Cisco peers, and with third-party peers that comply with all relevant standards." That's better. I guess a little public flogging does get results.

Amazingly, Jamey Heary over at Network World's Cisco Subnet Blog carries Cisco's PR water and claims that it's all just a misunderstanding. Jamey writes, "Many of us, myself included, always interpreted the original quote in the way it was intended. So we didn’t ever think twice about it." Really? So where Cisco said, "ASAs support IPsec LAN-to-LAN VPNs with other Cisco peers. Because we adhere to VPN industry standards, ASAs may work with other vendors' peers in LAN-to-LAN VPNs; however, we do not support them," you always interpreted that to mean that they did support them and you claim that's what Cisco always meant? Really? Wow. Evidently, Jamey had access to an advanced English grammar and mind-reading class in school that I didn't.

Free Software Foundation Files Suit Against Cisco For GPL Violations

2008-12-11T13:50:00.000-08:00

Matt Asay, Savio Rodrigues, Matthew Aslett (just today), and I have recently been having a cross-blog discussion about Cisco and open source. If you haven't been following it, here's the summary.

Matt Asay originally kicked off the debate by noting how Cisco is using a lot of open source in its products.

I responded by saying that using open source wasn't really all that interesting as many companies use open source. The reality, I said, was that Cisco was just driving down its costs and pocketing the additional profit, without passing on any benefits to its customers.

Savio responded to my post by suggesting that there is some benefit for customers when a manufacturer is able to use open source to implement a feature and thereby free-up development resources to implement other features that customers are interested in.

I agreed with that point as far as it went but pointed out that nothing Savio said was particularly specific to open source. Whenever a manufacturer chooses to buy pre-implemented technology rather than reinventing the wheel with its own resources, customers experience the same benefit, whether the technology is closed or open source, and regardless of the price paid, which is zero in the case of open source.

Matt Asay then responded to Savio and my posts saying that he was sympathetic to my view but being a believer in the free market hoped that everything was self correcting in the end ("Leechers never prosper" ??).

Matthew Aslett then joined the discussion with two more points. Quoting Matthew:

The first is that, while Dave notes “if you’re complying with the appropriate license terms, I don’t have a problem with that”, if we assume (as Dave does) that Cisco is abiding by its obligations, then he is effectively asking Cisco to go beyond those obligations in passing on “open source benefits” to users.

I wrote recently about the five stages of engagement in open source communities, as described by the Eclipse Foundation. ... It would probably be fair to say that Cisco is currently at stage two (1, USE in the graphic) in this five stage process (”The vendor begins to make use of open source software internally as part of its ongoing research and development process, realizing that it can save money on non-differentiating code and improve interoperability”). ... In my experience companies quite quickly see the benefit of moving from there to contribute to and then champion open source development, which would be likely to deliver the benefits Dave is looking for.

To respond briefly to Matthew right here, I would simply say that I agree with his model and his basic points as far as they go. I agree that as long as you're legally compliant that everything is fine and that anything beyond that is optional. I also agree with the Eclipse model that Matthew describes in his posting (see the graphic) and that Cisco is currently at stage 1, using open source. (Note that I didn't call this "stage 2" as Matthew did because I find it confusing. The graphic labels this stage "1" and stage "0" is really non-use.)

In short, I'm not suggesting that Cisco is "bad" for doing what they are doing. I'm simply suggesting that we shouldn't be holding the company up as a paragon of open source development for being in Stage 1 and simply using the code. LOTS of companies are in Stage 1 these days. Matthew says, "In my experience companies quite quickly see the benefit of moving from there to contribute to and then champion open source development, which would be likely to deliver the benefits Dave is looking for." This is an example of the kind of forward credit that I don't think Cisco deserves. I won't hold my breath that IOS will be open sourced any time soon.

So, to summarize my original objection, I'm not trying to make a value judgment about Cisco's behavior (I'll point out that Savio first used the "leech" term, not me). I'm simply requesting that everybody be accurate in describing Cisco's behavior, and I'm commenting on things that customers are not getting as long as Cisco is just using open source. Whether that's a problem for customers or not is up to them.

Now, my own personal belief is that there are many reasons that customers benefit from open platforms, but as others have pointed out, I work for Vyatta and I'm quite biased that way. Like Matt Asay, I'm a believer in free-markets and I don't believe that open-source is a one-size-fits-all business model for every situation, industry, etc., but I do strongly believe that open source fuels innovation in ways that closed-source can't. Some people don't agree with me and would prefer to buy closed products. That's fine. They have that right.

But all that's a moot point because one of our fundamental assumptions, that Cisco is complying with the terms of the various open source licenses, appears to be in question. Today the FSF filed suit against Cisco for violating the terms of the GPL and LGPL. You can read more about the complaint on the FSF's blog.

Answering Savio: "Is Cisco an open source leech?"

2008-12-09T18:52:00.000-08:00

Earlier today over at InfoWorld, Savio Rodrigues posted a response to my previous posting about Cisco using open source and pocketing the profits, titled "Is Cisco and open source leech?"

After summarizing my posting, Savio responds with:

I'm inclined to reach a slightly different conclusion.

When WebSphere stopped developing its own HTTP Server and began to use the Apache Web Server, IBM did two things that helped the customer. First, IBM took some of the folks working on IBM's HTTP server and reassigned them to work on other features that have customer value. This clearly helped IBM customers because the new features delivered by the reassigned engineers solved customer pain points. Second, IBM ensured that some of the original HTTP server head count was assigned to work on the Apache project as part of their IBM role. This helped IBM and non-IBM customers alike in building out a more robust product at Apache. IBM has used this approach for many components within IBM products. It seems that Cisco is following step one from the IBM approach.

Okay, so Savio says that there are two ways that Cisco using open source could be delivering some benefits to customers:

They can reassign resources to develop other features.
They could could contribute back to projects.

Savio all-but agrees that they probably aren't doing too much of the second, though that's hard to quantify without going through the change logs of each of the projects they might be using. For the sake of argument, as I said in my original post, let's give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they are doing some amount of contribution. My guess is that whenever they find obvious bugs, they're making fixes and contributing those back. To do otherwise simply means that they have more to maintain in the long run, so it's in their best interests to pass on things that they find.

Now, this response is really aimed at Savio's first point, which I think has some flawed thinking. Saying that having an otherwise closed-source vendor using open source benefits customers because it allows the vendor to develop other features, while true on the face of it, is really unrelated to open source itself. By this definition, doing anything which frees up resources to be allocated to other features delivers the same benefit. This is simply classical build vs. buy decision making. Any well-run engineering team should spend most of its time creating differentiated value rather than reinventing the wheel for no good reason. Thus, when given the choice of building versus buying technology, all things being equal, you should buy it if it's available at a lower price than your expected development cost for the same feature. In the case of open source, Cisco is simply "buying" these features at a cost of $0.

My argument is that customers would never know the difference if Cisco was buying closed-source software components for a price much more than $0. Simply, the savings are not being passed on to customers. That's the fundamental point that Savio still hasn't answered.

Summary: Is Cisco getting an advantage from open source? Yes. It has chosen a "buy strategy" where the cost to purchase technology is $0. Does the "buy strategy" benefit customers? Yes, because resources can be deployed to other features. Are the benefits of the "buy strategy" unique to open source? No, the customer gets roughly the same benefit of additional features whether the code in question is open source or whether Cisco uses closed-source. Does the "buy strategy" benefit customers because Cisco is "buying" open source technology at a cost of $0? No, because that savings really isn't being passed on to customers and they receive no additional, traditional open source benefits.

Sooooo... I stand by my earlier assertion.

Lie: "You can't run a network using open source..."

2008-11-20T14:12:00.001-08:00

So I just got done writing a rebuttal to Matt Asay's article, Cisco: All the open source that's fit to ship.

This is a follow-up, because there is one implication of Matt's article that Matt suggested, but sort of slipped through the cracks. You see, with one side of its mouth, Cisco suggests that only its proprietary IOS is capable of running today's modern networks. Only IOS and ASIC-powered Cisco hardware, you see, have the stability, reliability, and performance required in today's demanding networking environment.

I dealt with the ASIC lie a few months ago. As for the software lie, the fact that Cisco is using so much open source in its ASA and PIX products reveals it. If you're using Cisco products today, you're already using gobs of open source software. You just don't know it because it's rolled into an otherwise proprietary offering and branded "IOS." And you're overpaying for it, as I said in the previous posting. But the fact is, nobody, least of all Cisco, can claim that open source isn't good for networking. It's so good that Cisco stuffed at least 45 open source packages into the ASA/PIX families. If it didn't work, all those proprietary products shouldn't work either.

Fortunately, with Vyatta you can get all that yummy, open source goodness, with a fully open, extensible software system, utilizing low-cost commodity hardware, for a price that will make you a hero during the coming recession.

Cisco: reducing costs with open source, pocketing profits

2008-11-20T11:41:00.000-08:00

I like Matt Asay. I have interacted with him for a couple years on the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), having Vyatta speak at a couple of sessions. Matt's a really intelligent guy, a great writer, and a big open-source advocate. So... it's with great sadness that I'm going to have to take Matt to task in this posting.

Back in October, Matt posted this to his C|net blog: Cisco: All the open source that's fit to ship.

Says Matt:

If you were to rate the companies that use the most open-source software in their products, who would be top of your list? Red Hat, given that it's a pure-play open-source company? IBM, given its massive investments in Linux and Apache?

Or how about Cisco, with this impressive list of open-source licenses used for software embedded in Cisco's security appliances?

In this posting, Matt highlights that Cisco is using an enormous number of open source projects to create its products. He references this list of licenses from the ASA and PIX product lines to bolster his point.

Clearly, this is a long list of licenses, about 45 by my count. That means that Cisco must be using at least 45 open source packages to build the ASA/PIX appliances, because the list only references licenses and a license could be used to cover more than one package (say the GPL covering tens of packages, for instance).

Here's the problem with Matt's analysis: it focuses on usage. Sure, Cisco is using open source. I would ask, "Who isn't?" Honestly, in the networking industry, I can't think of a single company that isn't using open source of some sort. Junos is based on FreeBSD, for instance, Fortinet uses Linux, Extreme uses Linux, etc. In fact, even before Linux got to be the hot thing, many companies were using some amount of open source in the form of something like BSD's networking stack. So, honestly, there is nothing new here.

The fact that Cisco, or anybody, uses open source as an ingredient technology isn't surprising. It's a great way to reduce costs. The question is, do you, the user get any benefit from it? If not, then do you really care whether some of the ingredient technologies in an otherwise proprietary product are open source?

Now, I don't want anybody to think that I'm bashing companies that make proprietary products using open source technologies. If you're complying with the appropriate license terms, I don't have a problem with that. Let me be clear that I think there are some good reasons for being more open, but if you're complying with the terms, I'm cool.

My objection is Matt's suggestion that somehow Cisco, or anybody, simply using open source is in any way interesting in itself. Matt will point out that he says, "When did Cisco become an open-source company? Hint: it didn't." The next sentence then goes on to say, "It has just allowed more and more open-source software to pervade its products, making open source business-as-usual for Cisco (and its wide range of customers)."

There are two ways to read that sentence. One is that Cisco is somehow being good with open source and it's becoming part of its business practices. Another, more cynical view, is that Cisco is going about its business making closed, proprietary systems but doing so using open source "raw materials." I think Matt meant the first interpretation, but all I see is the second.

Specific questions I would ask myself about any company "using" open source:

Did the company in question pass on the costs saved in development to me?
Is the majority of the code open to me for modification if I want to, or is the open source wrapped up in so much proprietary code that it really isn't standalone. In other words, it's great that a company would use something like Apache as the web server in its products, but just getting the source code to Apache isn't really interesting if the rest of the code in the product is otherwise closed.
Can I fix bugs in the code myself?
Will the company take back contributions from me so that I don't have to keep fixing bugs in the code myself?
Does the company contribute back in the form of patches, marketing, documentation, etc?

If the answer is "No" to most of those, then I think you have a proprietary product wrapping itself in the flag of open source for PR/marketing reasons. In this particular case, I think it's safe to say that Cisco's use of open source results in a negative answer to most, if not all of those questions (maybe Cisco is contributing back to the projects they are using; I honestly haven't browsed the version control system logs for any of them). Indeed, we have covered before the fact that Cisco has a gross margin of 64%, one of the highest in the tech industry.

In the leading paragraphs of his article, Matt compares Cisco with Red Hat and IBM, and I think that's giving Cisco way too much credit. Red Hat is clearly a good open source citizen. IBM, while it still retains a large number of proprietary products, has found its stride promoting its proprietary technologies at the same time being a huge benefactor to open source. Both of these companies answer "yes" to most of the questions above (at least for specific products in the case of IBM).

Including Cisco in that same category does a disservice to those other companies.

Deploying Vyatta in Amsterdam (with photos)

2008-11-20T09:32:00.000-08:00

Ben King from Net That Works has a nice write up of a Vyatta deployment he did in Amsterdam, complete with photos. Big BGP, firewalling, and "routing on a stick" were key features of the deployment.

The conclusion:

Although this is not anything like the biggest Vyatta deployment we have done, I like it because it demonstrates how using HP and Vyatta you can very effectively deliver a relatively complex redundent solution for a fraction of the equivelent Cisco price.

Vyatta Announces Comprehensive Network Bailout

2008-10-03T09:19:00.000-07:00

Well, the last couple of weeks have seen a complete roller-coaster ride for the economy. Like a true roller-coaster, while there may be intermediate ups and downs, the general trajectory is always down. The mortgage crisis here in the USA will be rippling through the global economy for months and years to come. As I write this, the US Congress is debating various bailout packages. While I'll keep my own personal views on the various bailouts private, what is clear is that you can't trust the same people responsible for the whole crisis to fix it well without going immediately partisan and everybody trying to cover their own tails.

The real question going through the head of everybody that I talk to is, "How is this going to affect us?" For most people, the most immediate personal effect is simply diminished portfolio values if they were invested in the stock market (which may include a lot of retirement portfolios in 401(k) retirement accounts). I think the long-term answer is that we're going to see a tightening of the economy very similar to what we saw back in 2002. This means that companies are going to try to hold on to a lot of their cash because it won't be as easy to get even short-term credit when they need it. Even if companies are not directly involved with the whole financial mess, we can expect a round of budget cuts as executives try to provide cushion for ongoing operations while they asses how they are going to be impacted long-term. Ultimately, this means that you the IT manager are going to be forced to perform with less budget.

Fortunately, Vyatta can help you do that. Each month, over 20,000 network managers download Vyatta so that they can take advantage of "Moore's Law Economics" for their network. With Vyatta, they get twice the performance at half the cost or better. In good times or bad, everyday, that's the Vyatta advantage. In these uncertain economic times, however, we wanted to do a bit more.

Yesterday, we announced a "network bailout package" designed to further ease the pain. For the next month and a half, if you buy five Vyatta appliances or software subscriptions, you get the sixth one free. That's an additional 17% off the already low price. With that, you'll get great technology, awesome service, and the good feeling of know that you aren't throwing gobs of money into the pockets of the fat-cat networking companies.

Let me dwell on that for a moment. If you're new to Vyatta, you might not know what we mean by Moore's Law Economics. Last quarter, Cisco announced a gross profit of $6.6B on $10.3B in sales. That's a profit margin of 64%, one of the highest in the IT industry. That means that 64-cents of every dollar you spend with Cisco is gross profit.

In comparison, the gross profit for Dell (a good representative of the x86 ecosystem) in its last quarter was $2.8B on $16.4B in sales, or 17%. Because Dell exists as part of a competitive ecosystem, not a proprietary near-monopoly, it can't price-gouge for its technology the way Cisco can. Further, it has to innovate quickly in order to remain competitive. That dynamic is what we mean by Moore's Law Economics--more innovation, faster, with competitive pricing.

(By the way, don't think you're going to get a better deal from the other proprietary networking companies. Last quarter, Juniper announced a gross profit of $590M on sales of $879M, or 67% gross margin. While Juniper likes to portray itself as a more cost-effective competitor, Juniper has a slightly higher gross margin than Cisco.)

With Vyatta, your network can take advantage of Moore's Law Economics. With Cisco and other proprietary vendors, you're stuck paying whatever they want you to pay, with profit margins that are three to four times as high as the x86 ecosystem. I'd call that an economic crisis. Fortunately, that's easy to fix and Vyatta is here to help. By making a few good choices and taking advantage of Vyatta's comprehensive bailout program, you can keep more money in your pocket for a rainy day. If you're feeling rich after making the switch, maybe you can loan some of that cash to the rest of us.

Oops...

2008-09-25T17:00:00.001-07:00

I found this funny, just because it's fun to goof on Cisco. Certainly nothing of strategic importance, but humorous. Watch those regexs next time, guys.

http://blog.dotsmart.net/2008/09/25/cisco-home-page-fail/

SLLUG meeting: Using Vyatta to replace Cisco gear

2008-09-11T13:45:00.000-07:00

Tristan Rhodes will be presenting to the Salt Lake City LUG about replacing Cisco gear with Vyatta on Sept 17, 2008. If you're interested, more information can be found at: http://blog.mecworks.com/articles/2008/09/11/sept-17-2008-sllug-meeting-using-vyatta-to-replace-cisco-gear/

McCafferty is a rockstar. And thanks for the recognition

2008-08-29T09:15:00.000-07:00

It's always fun to see what people are saying about Vyatta out on the web. Most of the time, it's very complimentary, but it typically is discussion of the product or the overall concept of Vyatta itself. We just stumbled on this blog post the other day, and it made me smile.

Marketing is a tough job. The engineers will never admit to it because their job is hard, too, and everybody needs somebody to sneer at. (In marketing, we sneer at the sales guys, but that's another discussion. :-) ). The engineers are somewhat right, however, because most technology marketing sucks. At Vyatta, Tom McCafferty and I have tried for the outset to keep it real and connect with everybody in the community. At the end of the day, we have always believed that Vyatta is a collaboration between our employees and the community. On the communications side, nobody wants to read lots of vacuous marketing copy that drones on and on without saying anything.

When we created our Vyatta corporate newsletter, we had a choice. We could do what most companies do and simply talk at you, or we could try to give you something that would be entertaining and interesting at the same time. Most corporate newsletters are BOH-RING, and they get deleted from everybody's email box without even being opened. So, we went the latter route and tried to keep it real, and fun.

It was fun to see the blog post above recognize that. Tom is the force behind the newsletter every month. He's a rockstar. He took over the text-only monthly email that I had been writing previously and developed a nice HTML format. Each month, he writes the copy, collects all the links, and comes up with the ad concepts. And each month the result is good.

Because of Tom's great work, we are constantly getting compliments about the newsletter. People laugh and send us back responses to something we have included. At trade shows, people are constantly stopping by and saying, "I love the fake ads!" In fact, we get submissions of fake ads or concepts from our customers and community members all the time. And, most importantly, we have an unsubscribe rate to the newsletter that is practically non-existent.

If you haven't signed up for the Vyatta corporate newsletter, you can do so right here. Check it out. Odds are that you'll chuckle every month, you'll get informed about what's happening with Vyatta, and you won't want to unsubscribe. The choice is yours.

Vyatta Virtual Router on Hyper-V

2008-08-25T12:13:00.000-07:00

We have lots of users who have configured virtualized Vyatta instances using both VMware and Xen. From time to time, we get asked whether Vyatta also runs in Microsoft's Hyper-V. The previous answer was always, "It should, but we haven't actually verified that it does. If you get it working, let us know."

Well, Stefan Stranger just blogged about using Vyatta in Hyper-V and provides a nice set of instructions and screen shots for getting it all up and running. The summary is that it's very straightforward.

So, add Hyper-V to the list of virtualization solutions supported by Vyatta.

Note that the only virtualization solution that we know Vyatta doesn't currently support are "containers"-like systems such as OpenVZ and the commercial products based on that architecture (e.g. Parallels Virtuozzo). OpenVZ uses a completely different, non-hypervisor-based model that requires "awareness" in the Vyatta system kernel. We haven't yet made those kernel mods, so Vyatta yet run on OpenVZ.

PIX is dead. Long live PIX.

2008-07-30T10:58:00.000-07:00

So Cisco just announced the end-of-sale for the PIX product line. This was not unexpected. Ever since Cisco announced the ASA product family, it was clear that the PIX was on the chopping block. Cisco will stop selling PIX products immediately but will continue to support them through 2013.

Customers who were riding the PIX bandwagon and are now faced with a decision might want to look at Vyatta or other solutions. While the ASA is a reasonable product, Vyatta can deliver far more flexibility over time without the threat of proprietary lock-in prices for upgrades and expansion. Where Cisco charges for each and every add-on, Vyatta includes far more functionality in the base product and has more headroom. Further, hardware expansion is a fraction of what Cisco charges, even when they allow you to expand at all.

It's all about ASICs, right?

2008-05-20T12:45:00.000-07:00

Every so often, Vyatta gets queries from potential users asking about Vyatta technology. One of those came in to our info-line this morning, and it's a frequently-asked-question, so I answered it with a lengthy reply and I'm going to post the question and answer here as well.

Fundamentally, the question is about the special mojo that Cisco must put into its products, right?

I’ve worked with almost all OS’s you can find and most devices as well.

I’ve read the articles on the OpenSource vs. Cisco, and to be honest I’ve known for a while now that most linux/unix os’s with some tweaking can do the same as most Cisco routers/switches.

But I also know that a lot of development not only goes into the os(source) of the devices, but also the device hardware which is specifically developed for routing/switching.

I would like to know will normal proprietary over the counter hardware match up to the Cisco device hardware?

Brandon

Here's my lengthy answer. I might have given Brandon more than he was looking for, but I figured it would pay dividends if I also blogged it.

Brandon,

The answer to your question is complex, but let me take a shot at breaking it down. Apologies for the long response, but there simply isn't a quick answer to your question.

The simple answer is that it depends highly on which market segment you're looking at.

First, let's separate switches and other appliances (routers, firewalls, etc.). All switches are ASIC-based and are definitely tuned to process packets as quickly as possible. On the other hand, they don't really do much processing other than basic forwarding and possibly some queuing for QoS. The ASICs are tuned for the forwarding task but they can't do much else, and there is typically only a small, embedded processor handling the management interface. It's incapable of doing a lot of heavy-lifting. The operating system in a switch has little to nothing to do with its performance because it's just running the management interface. In spite of that, many switches run on a standard operating system. For instance, Extreme Networks switches run Linux. So, to sum this up, you aren't going to terminate a VPN on your switch, but if you want 48-ports of cost-effective, wire-speed Gigabit Ethernet forwarding performance, switches are just the thing.

Now, let's take a look at appliances. Many of the appliances that are out on the market are based on standard operating systems (Linux or FreeBSD) under the hood, and many are implemented using standard PC hardware. For instance, Fortinet UTM boxes, Juniper J-Series routers, and Riverbed WAN optimization boxes are all based on PCs. Fortinet runs Linux under the hood. Juniper's JunOS is based on FreeBSD. Riverbed uses Linux.

Cisco's IOS is based on a custom, embedded OS because Linux didn't exist back when it was first created and the Unix systems of the day were too resource hungry for the cost structure that they wanted to achieve. While Cisco's low-end hardware is not based on PC platforms, it is not based on much specialized hardware. The ISR series uses a chip from SiByte that contains 4x MIPS architecture cores. So even the ISR is really a software-based device. Further, these cores are underpowered today and are not as fast as off-the-shelf processors. If Cisco were to start over, with a clean slate, I think they would probably make completely different architectural choices. In fact, they are moving this direction, slowly. The recently announced Cisco ASR, while it uses custom silicon, runs IOS on Linux. When Juniper had the chance to start from a clean slate, they chose FreeBSD as the foundation for JunOS and used x86 chips as the CPU for all the Juniper route processor modules.

Now, what you say is definitely true in the high-end of the networking market. Cisco's CRS-1 and Juniper's M and T series routers all use ASICs to perform high-speed forwarding. In this sense, they are more like switches. As with switches, they are very fast, but the processing they perform is not very rich. That's okay for where they sit in the network. The core of the Internet needs to be fast; it doesn't need to be terminating VPNs, doing load balancing, or executing IDS code.

Other parts of the network are different (say the branch office, the edge of service provider networks, or in data centers in front of individual applications), which is why you find many of the appliances that sit there running on Linux/BSD on x86 processors.

So, to summarize, switches are definitely ASIC-based and the operating system has nothing to do with their performance. Some switches (Extreme), even run Linux. In the high-end of the routing space (Cisco GSR and CRS-1; Juniper M and T series), the insides are more like a switch than a router. Like a switch, the forwarding is all handled by ASICs. Still, JunOS is based on FreeBSD. Finally, in the mid-range of the appliance market (routers, firewalls, VPNs, load balancers, etc.), many devices are implemented using standard operating systems running on x86. This is the market place that Vyatta is addressing with our products.

Finally, I'd point out that even if it was true that Cisco's ISR family was implemented using special ASICs and secret networking mojo, the results speak for themselves. The fact is, Vyatta has outperformed the Cisco ISR and 7200 with standard Intel processors at a fraction of the cost. If those Cisco products were using ASICs, that evidentally didn't matter very much in the final analysis. All the custom silicon and engineering did was raise the costs to develop those products, costs that were then passed on to customers. You can find those test results in the Tolly reports here: http://www.vyatta.com/documentation/whitepapers.php

Cheers,

-- Dave

So there you have it. The fact is, whether something is ASIC-based or not should be irrelevant to a consumer. The only thing we should care about is the price/performance of a device in our network and whether it can do the job we need it to do. It could be powered by ASICs, general purpose processors running software, or hamsters running on a wheel, as long as it works.

Maybe the ASIC/networking-mojo myth is a mental crutch. If $8000 of server hardware and Vyatta software can outperform a $35,000 Cisco router, where's the secret mojo that you're supposedly paying for? And if it doesn't exist, why should you pay for it? If you're committed to buying overpriced systems, maybe you need to believe there is something magical about them to justify it to yourself.

Cisco rootkit

2008-05-19T16:30:00.000-07:00

Network World has a nice story today about a researcher who has created a rootkit for Cisco gear. I bring this to your attention, not because I want to criticize Cisco for having security issues, but rather because so many people think that if they just buy Cisco they are safe from this sort of thing. Nothing could be further from the truth!

The myth goes something like this:

Everybody has bugs and therefore has the potential for security flaws.
Because my proprietary vendor keeps its source code closed, however, the bad guys can't see that code and are thus hampered in developing exploits.
My proprietary vendor keeps me safe by employing a large security team to constantly monitor its own development and fix any flaws that it uncovers.
If my proprietary vendor uncovers a security flaw, they will use their vast resources to inform me of that flaw with instructions as to what I should do to deal with the problem.

The first statement in that list is true. The rest are all false. The facts are:

The bad guys already have Cisco's code. The reality here is that no code of any worth can be kept absolutely private. There are too many people at Cisco who have access to that code to keep it safe for long. Ditto with Juniper, Nortel, or anybody else. The same things have happened in the past to Microsoft. If your network security plan relies on the bad guys not having the code, it is fundamentally flawed.
It's great to have a security team that is monitoring your own products for flaws, but it's better to have a large community that is monitoring your products for flaws. At a certain level, you have to question the conflict-of-interest of an internal security team. Are they really incentivized to release information about potential exploits? How quickly? If security is in conflict with other internal priorities, what wins? We have seen lots of vendors sit on critical bugs for months after they have been discovered and communicated to them.
Finally, what happens when flaws are discovered? In Cisco's case, it sued a researcher trying to warn the world of potential security problems. Is your vendor really being forthcoming about issues, or are they trying to silence reasonable, serious discussions about security problems?

I have said it before and I'll say it again: There are two types of companies, those that have security issues and those that are lying. Open source tends to handle the exploits better (not perfectly!) when they occur by providing reliable information rapidly to the people who are in the best position to make use of that information.

Many people believe that security is increased when there is a free flow of information about systems. As the source code thefts make clear, you have to assume that the bad guys have the code. If the bad guys are left to work by themselves in a secret back room, trying to discover remote exploits, they will find them. Your only chance to stay ahead of that is to give the good guys all the information they need to find the exploits first. That can only be done when there is free access to the code.

Is a Cisco rootkit surprising? No, not if you have an accurate view of the world. It's only surprising if you were buying into the myth that your proprietary vendor was immune to that sort of thing. Is a Cisco rootkit necessarily a big problem? Again, no, because if you had an accurate view of the world you always knew something like this could be done and you'd be trying to make sure your systems were secure from the start.

Could somebody develop a Vyatta rootkit? Sure. The difference is that we'll tell you that's a possibility up front and we won't act surprised when it happens. In fact, given that Vyatta is based on Linux and there are many Linux rootkits floating around the ether, it's likely that one could be easily adapted to work with a Vyatta system. That's all the more reason to dispense with any other security myths you may be holding on to and get down to securing your systems.

News Flash: Your Vyatta system just got cheaper

2008-04-22T09:05:00.000-07:00

Here's a great example of the power of Ecosystem Economics™.

Cnet News.com is reporting that Intel just cut the prices of some of its quad-core CPUs by 50%. Obviously, this doesn't translate into a 50% cut in system prices, but isn't it nice to know that you'll be getting more power tomorrow for a lower price?

Obviously, your Cisco system probably won't get any cheaper tomorrow, barring a random pricing action from Cisco. Bummer.

This posting isn't the follow-up article I promised you the other day when we were talking about the Grid of Openness™, but it was a timely highlight of an underlying point: open source + open hardware = Ecosystem Economics™. Ecosystem Economics™ immediately incorporates any pricing action into the whole market and everybody benefits.

Unless your networking vendor is sitting in the upper-right box in the Grid of Openness™, you'll never see benefits from things like this latest move from Intel. I'll try to expand on this point a bit more this week and we'll call it the follow up post I promised last time.

"Open" 'Cause We Say So

2008-04-18T10:03:00.000-07:00

So the recent feeding frenzy related to "open" networking devices started me thinking. What, exactly, do we mean by open?

This is one of those times in the market where a bandwagon starts to develop and everybody is hopping on board. Marketers around the networking industry are suddenly rushing around with yellow PostIt™ notes to stick the word "open" onto anything and everything. You half expect commercials such as, "The Global Networking Conglomerate 3000, now with improved 'openness.'" All this labeling of everything open really begs the question of what we mean by openness. And more to the point, what do consumers want "open" to mean? The answer from most of the vendors making announcements lately seems to be, "It's 'open' because we say so."

Over the next few paragraphs, let's examine what "open" could possibly mean, and then we'll try to triangulate the positions of the various companies that have announced "open" products.

It seems to me that there are at least two dimensions for openness: hardware and software. There may be more, but those are certainly the most obvious and having two dimensions makes for a good graph. Along each dimension, there are (at least) four degrees of openness.

For instance, along the hardware dimension a company could have:

Proprietary hardware -- This represents the most-closed hardware. Developing for this sort of platform requires an embedded development kit because the architecture is non-standard. Note that proprietary hardware may use standard components, such as x86 CPUs, but because of the way the hardware is designed, it's still an embedded system, not standard.
x86 blade -- When proprietary companies want to "open up" the hardware, they often do so by adding an x86 blade to the system. While the "host" hardware system is still very proprietary, the blade uses a more standard PC architecture and may use more standard development tools.
x86-based -- In this model, the hardware is completely standard, but is sold as a proprietary system. Many security and traffic management appliances use this model. The vendor buys a white-box PC, adds a branded label to it, and then loads their own software onto the system. While the hardware is completely standard under the hood, there is no suggestion from the vendor that the user is able to swap components or perform system upgrades using standard components.
Commodity hardware -- This is the final model. The system uses completely open hardware and the supplier and customer both expect that users will be able to perform system upgrades with components from different vendors. The current x86 server market delivers this kind of hardware today.

Similarly, along the software dimension, the following four models can be seen:

Proprietary software -- In this model, the software is completely closed. It's sold only in binary form. Users use the software and there is no ability to develop extensions without acquiring a proprietary license.
Country-club API -- In this model, the company opens some APIs that allow external developers to interact with its otherwise-proprietary system in a programmatic way, but the API or SDK must be licensed from the company. Typically, the company tightly controls who is allowed to participate in the program and may charge a multi-thousand-dollar "program fee" to participate. This makes the program as exclusive as a country-club.
Open API -- In this model, the API is completely open, with no strings attached in order to get it an use it. A public SDK, posted for free download from a web site would qualify here. The code you're interfacing with would still be closed-source, but at least you could get ahold of the SDK without paying any fees or being "approved." Note that you may still have to buy oodles of proprietary hardware in order to do any development, but at least the SDK is freely available.
Open source -- This is obviously the most open. The source code is readily available and there are no fees to develop with the system.

Now, given all these definitions, we can make a chart that describes the landscape graphically:

I've also plotted some of the recent announcements according to how I think they stack up.

Vyatta -- Vyatta first launched its product in July 2006. Vyatta has been open source and running on open, commodity hardware since the get-go. Want to download our software? You can do it from the web site. Want to download the source code? We have instructions in plain view. Want to run your Vyatta system on whatever hardware you want? That's fine by us, and we have even published a hardware compatibility list to help you choose something known to work well, but you're free to go off-menu as well.
3Com -- 3Com was early out of the gate, over a year ago (1Q07). 3Com announced an x86 blade for its routers and a country-club API software program, called OSN. OSN has a couple membership different levels, with the lowest level free to join, so it may be that OSN is walking the line between a country-club API and an open API.
Juniper -- Next up was Juniper in December 2007 with the PSDP program. The PSDP was a country-club API program delivered on the same proprietary hardware they had shipped previously (no blades required). There are a couple of positions for Juniper on the chart because they have different product lines with different implementation techniques and different capabilities. From what I have read, the PSDP only applies to the high-end service provider routers; the Juniper J-series routers are essentially PCs with a proprietary software load. Juniper does change the connectors and form-factor of the add-in cards so they look proprietary, but they're just standard PCI hardware under the hood. The processor is a stock Intel x86 CPU.
Riverbed -- In February 2008, Riverbed started making noise about opening up with its RiOS Services Platform (RSP). Riverbed is a good example of an appliance vendor using stock PC hardware with a proprietary software load. The RSP program puts Riverbed into the country-club API on x86-based hardware category on this chart.
Cisco -- Finally, in April 2008, Cisco announced its Application eXtension Platform (AXP) program. This is another good example of a country-club API paired with an x86-based blade to plug into proprietary hardware. Of course, the AXP is only available on the ISR series; the rest of Cisco's product line remains locked up tighter than Fort Knox and finds itself down in the Proprietary/Proprietary category.

This post is already getting pretty long, so I'll cut it off here. The major takeaway of all this is that there are different degrees of "open" that are running about the networking market these days. With everybody using the same word, and being intentionally vague (and sometimes misleading), it's easy to confuse one "open" for another. But they're not created equal. Don't be afraid to ask a vendor why they think they're being particularly open. If you don't like the vague, "'cause we say so" answer you're likely to get initially, don't be afraid to press ahead. At least at Vyatta, we have no trouble answering that question. The other guys...? Well, who knows.

In a follow-on post, we'll discuss the implications of being more open. Are there really differences between an x86-blade with a country-club API versus open source software running on commodity hardware? The short answer is you betcha! See you next time.

Dumb and Dumber

2008-04-10T15:14:00.000-07:00

When you're a big networking company and all your competitors are talking about open networking platforms, you have to do something... fast. Unfortunately, charging oodles of money for a low-performance x86 blade that you can stuff into your router seems to be the typical response. Hang with me for a moment and I'll explain.

Our story starts way back in January 2007 when 3Com announced its Open Services Networking initiative. At the time, 3Com said that it was "opening up" its routers by allowing you to run Linux on an x86-based blade that plugged into its systems. Since that time, 3Com has announced a few partners and applications that have been developed. Back in early 2007, most people yawned. Frankly, this was a pretty obvious innovation in the industry and hey, it was from 3Com, so who cares?

Next, Juniper got into the act when it announced the piss-dip (PSDP) on the first day of Cisco's yearly analyst conference in December 2007? The piss-dip, as you'll recall, is a program to allow a group of country-club ISVs to implement interesting functionality on top of Juniper's products using some nifty APIs. In return for a development fee and some legal paperwork, Juniper sends you a software development kit (SDK) and you're good to go. Notably, Juniper did not announced an overpriced x86-blade for its routers as part of the program. That may be because Juniper already sells overpriced x86-blades (they're called "Routing Engines" to make you feel more comfortable paying that much).

Now, Cisco couldn't take all that laying down. They had to respond. And fast. When asked at the analyst conference, they waved their hands and said, "...someday..." But this was embarrassing. Here we have nearly-dead 3Com and now arch-rival Juniper going where Cisco has never gone, and flaunting it in front of Cisco's not-nearly-skeptical-enough analyst corps. That's not good.

So, enter the Application eXtension Platform (AXP). Basically, Cisco aped 3Com's approach: with the AXP, you can pay wads of money for a low-performance x86-blade that plugs into your Integrated Services Router (ISR).

Let's look at the numbers. 3Com was trying to sell us a 1.4 GHz Pentium M, 1 GB RAM, 80 GB HDD system for over $3000 street price. Now we have Cisco trying to sell us a 1.4 GHz Pentium, 2 GB RAM, 160 GB HDD for over $6000 street (NME-522). Okay, so they did double the RAM and hard disk size. But in today's world, that's worth a grand total of about $79 (per CDW.com, 80 GB ($50) vs. 160 GB ($62) Seagate Barracuda SATA HDD, 1 GB ($77) vs. 2 GB ($144) Crucial PC3200 DRAM). Even at the low end of the three modules that Cisco announced, they're trying to charge $1700 for a 300 MHz Celeron (AIM-102)! Yup, you read that right, MHz, not GHz. Frankly, I didn't realize that you could still buy something that slow from Intel. I think that processor was completely obsolete nearly 10 years ago.

Now, realize that neither of these x86 blades is expandable in any way. If you don't like the performance or RAM or HDD size, you have no options. You can't upgrade them, short of buying a whole new module in Cisco's case. If you already bought the fastest one (NME-522), you're screwed. No expansion slots. No multi-core. No options. Bluntly, you're trapped in Cisco World™ and 3Com World™.

Does anybody else feel like we're watching the movie Dumb and Dumber here?

Of course, for both 3Com and Cisco, you also have to buy the router to plug these underpowered, overpriced x86 blades into. Presumably, you have already made that decision, so the $4000 to $15,000 of sunk cost shouldn't bother you.

At this point, I have to hand it to Juniper: the piss-dip looks pretty good when compared to these options. Juniper at least lets you run piss-dip applications on the Routing Engine you already paid for instead of charging you oodles more for another blade.

The point of this rant is simply that this is what you get from proprietary networking companies. Even when they serve up completely open technologies like Linux running on x86, it's going to be terribly expensive with lock in not far behind.

In contrast, Vyatta runs on standard x86 systems. You can buy those systems with Vyatta software preloaded, directly from Vyatta, or you can buy the hardware from your favorite hardware vendor and your software subscription from us. If you want a hybrid of the two approaches, that's fine with us, too. While Vyatta does mark up the hardware we sell, we try to keep that markup small and appropriate.

Importantly, with Vyatta, you aren't stuck with no options if you want to make a change to the system. Need to run faster? There are oodles of vendors with blazing multi-core systems available today. Want more memory? Fine, you can purchase it from just about anybody. Need a bigger hard drive? No problem. Want to add different applications to your system? It's pretty easy since Vyatta is Debian-compatible. Want to extend or hack the system? The source code is on the Internet and you can download it for free, without any legal paperwork.

The other guys will go on and on about their proprietary hardware. "You just can't do networking on standard x86 systems," they'll say. "You need our sooper-dooper ASICs to run fast, and well, you know how much those cost..."

But the fact is, it simply isn't true. With Vyatta and an IBM x3550 quad-core server, available for about $4000 or so, you can whip a $35,000 Cisco 7204/G2. With Vyatta and a $1000 Dell PowerEdge 860, you can demolish a Cisco 2821 ISR. Check out Vyatta's 3rd party testing if you don't believe me.

Once you're done doing that, you can use all those MIPS to run whatever applications you want, including many of the sorts of things that Cisco and 3Com would charge you for (remember that the x86 blades are just the hardware--you still have to buy applications from other vendors).

At the end of the day, the key point here is that the other guys charge you a lot of money to open up a closed system. And when you pay that money, you still find yourself stuck in an alternative reality called Cisco World™, Juniper World™ or 3Com World™.

Is that "open?" Not in the Real World™

Update: Okay, a commenter pointed out that I pulled the wrong prices for the Cisco AXP modules. I had incorrectly used the WAAS version of the NME-522. Apologies for that. It's the same hardware, but a different software load, and therefore a different price. Looks like list on the AXP version of the NME-522 is about $3500. More than 3Com, but reasonable given the doubling of memory and disk capacity. That said, I still stick with my main point that this is an expensive, underpowered PC with no flexibility, and that's after you purchase the router to plug it into. Rather than titling this post "Dumb and Dumber," maybe I'll have to change it to "Dumb and Dumb."

Kernel.org to be upgraded to FreeBSD 7.0

2008-04-01T09:54:00.000-07:00

Such is the word...

Wow, whoda thunk it?

Some of the comments back pointed out other documents worth reading today, just for historical perspective. Some of my favorite RFCs include:

I particularly like the last two as related to Vyatta's firewall implementation. We have had numerous requests for RFC 3514 support and are slotting it into a future release.

You can find a more complete list of interesting RFCs on Wikipedia.

Gotcha...

"The Patent Reform Act will harm the U.S. technology industry"

2008-03-10T09:47:00.001-07:00

Steve Tobak posted an article about the upcoming Patent Reform Act over at C|Net. I had just mentioned intellectual property reform a couple of days ago in this previous blog entry.

Interestingly, I disagree with Steve's analysis. Steve says:

Let's instead just cut to the chase. In lay terms, the bill makes it easier to challenge issued patents and harder for patent holders to obtain compensation through the U.S. legal system.

Steve argues that because the US is shifting away from a production economy to an intellectual property and licensing economy, these "reforms" are bad for US business. Steve says:

In one corner are big technology companies such as Apple, Cisco, Dell, Google, HP, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. These folks make a living selling products and services. They say that patent abuses in the current system are stifling innovation.

In the other corner are technology licensing companies such as 3M, Qualcomm, Rambus, Tessera, and biotech and pharmaceutical companies. They say the act will limit patent holder's rights and stifle innovation.

While each side claims the other limits innovation, the truth is that neither side cares about innovation; they are only concerned with their business model. That's not necessarily a bad thing, since a company's duty is primarily to its shareholders, but it does bear mentioning here.

Now, I have lived in the technology industry for quite some time. I have never worked at a large technology licensing company such as 3M, Qualcomm, Rambus, or in biomed or pharma. That probably biases my thinking.

On the other hand, I have about 10 patents, assigned to various companies I have worked for over the years. I have spent a reasonable amount of time dealing with the patent system.

The fact is, many patents are bogus (think Amazon's 1-Click patent). There, I said it. Many should not have been issued, either because they are so obvious to those knowledgeable in the art or because there was existing prior art. These bogus patents are a noose around the neck of the technology industry. They clog up the system and make it impossible to create almost anything without treading on somebody's patent without even knowing about it. With a patent term of 17 to 20 years, these bogus patents are in force for multiple product lifetimes. For perspective, 20 years is 10 to 13 turns of of the Moore's Law crank. Patents expiring now would have been issued back in 1990, before the explosive rise of the Internet (though the Internet was actually being used at that point, nobody outside of academic and tech circles had heard of it). If you don't think that stifles product innovation, you have never tried to innovate. I have lived with this environment all of my career. I have made decisions in the past to navigate around bogus patents, simply because the lawyers told me it was a lost cause to try to challenge them.

What's all the more infuriating about the current patent situation is that many of today's patents go against the original social contract surrounding patents. The original goal of the patent system was to get inventors to share their innovations for the common good. In return for a limited monopoly, you, Mr. Inventor, share your invention so that We, the public, can understand how you did it and can then innovate on top of it. Rather than stifling innovation, patents were supposed to drive it forward.

Unfortunately, many patents, even the ones that are legit, would have been created independently anyway. It's obviously a balance, but at least in the world I live in, I see patents getting in the way rather than helping me. I have never gone and looked at old patents to get new ideas for products. The only time an independent patent, one that I'm not working on filing myself, comes to my attention, it's because somebody is getting sued for infringing it. This tells me that we have lost the original goal that patents were supposed to foster.

Now, it's important to realize what the patent reform act doesn't do. It doesn't mean that patents are extinct. It also doesn't mean that bogus patents go away with a snap of the fingers. What it does do is allow for easier challenging of what appears to be a bogus patent. This may increase the cost of patent filings since more people could challenge the patent and you'd have to respond to it. Personally, I think this works. The costs should be weighted toward the party that has the most to gain from the granting of the patent. The downstream costs of litigating bogus patents (think not just lawyers but injunctions and product disruptions) are far higher than the cost of allowing patents to be challenged with greater frequency.

In short, I think the Patent Reform Act, while in no ways perfect (doesn't go far enough, IMO), is at least a step in the right direction. Admittedly, I don't work for a large intellectual property company or a biotech/pharma company. Perhaps I'd feel differently in that case, but from where I sit, if we really want to spur innovation, we should really overhaul the system even further than the Patent Reform Act.

Copyright law is broken

2008-03-05T17:48:00.000-08:00

Timothy B. Lee has a great article on Ars Technica about the struggle to apply copyright law in modern times. Frankly, intellectual property law is not scaling well with today's technology. The US Congress is presently in the middle of a major patent reform project which I daresay will not deliver from the moment it's put in effect. Copyright rules have been moving around constantly, with the MPAA and RIAA doing all they can to go after "illegal" file sharing.

If you're interested in the subject of copyright, and you should be if you're interested in open source, I highly recommend Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig. This book opened my eyes to the problems facing all sorts of industries because of various unintended consequences of the current copyright laws. One of the key points in the book is that because today's current copyright law recognizes that all creative works automatically receive copyright protection for the life of the author plus a large amount of time afterward, virtually everything in modern life is copyrighted and therefore is subject to a grant of permission before it can somehow be recycled into another work.

This idea that culture builds on the culture of a few years ago, recycling it and re-synthesizing it into something new and modern is important. An obvious example is a redramatization of an old story plot into a new movie or book (reusing plots from Greek tragedy, for instance). In music, it's about resampling and remixing to create something new (Vanilla Ice swiping the Queen "Under Pressure" baseline for "Ice, Ice, Baby"). Think about movie and television shows that must "clear" copyright on just about every image or sound that is shown. This world is only getting more complex by the day, and it's hampering the world around us, often for no good reason because most people don't care about the copyrights they are granted automatically by the law. Sometimes it's impossible to find out exactly who owns a given copyright and so it's impossible to reuse that material legally.

Free Culture does a great job describing some of the problems and suggesting reform that would at least mitigate some of the problems.

Now, what does this have to do with open source? Well, all open source licenses (the GNU Public License, BSD license, Mozilla Public license, etc.) basically rely on copyright law for their enforcement. The primary difference between the GPL and code that is in the public domain (uncopyrighted), for instance, is that the GPL can grant a set of rights, subject to a set of proscribed responsibilities, to a distributor of a product that uses the code. Public domain code can be used for any purpose whatsoever and effectively nullifies the GPL's "viral" nature that forces you to release your code. You can combine public domain code with your proprietary code and it effectively becomes proprietary.

Now, in a world without copyright, you could use anybody else's code for any purpose and you would not have to release your own source. But once your own source got out, you could not stop people redistributing it or using it for any purpose.

It's an interesting thought experiment to think about what would happen if all intellectual property law was simply abolished. No more copyright. No more patents. No more trademarks. I'm not sure I'm ready to go to that extreme, but it's very clear that even laws that "worked" in the 1970s are no longer able to deal with the environment of 2008. But changing these laws will create tectonic shifts of power and money and so the wheels of progress move slowly.

Buy yourself a copy of Free Culture and expand your mind.

You spend 5 years and $250M and that's all you came up with?

2008-03-04T12:54:00.000-08:00

Well, Cisco finally introduced the ASR 1000 family of routers this morning. It was, well, underwhelming. After a secretive ad campaign that featured the Easter Bunny, a bird man, a transvestite cupid, and a unicorn lady, I was geared up for something exciting. Instead, I got the ASR.

So far, most of my info has come from Network World, Light Reading, and Cisco's press release and data sheets. Here's how I see things:

First, I would not hang it out there as a badge of honor that you spent $250M and 5 years on this thing. If you're a Cisco stockholder, you should be screaming bloody murder. I talked to an analyst today who pointed out how many start ups you could have funded with that cash and how much technology you would have gotten back in return. Cisco should be hanging its head in shame.
It's positioned to replace the 7200, sort of. They'll still sell you the 7200 if you want, so it isn't technically obsolete... yet. Or you can pay something like 30 percent more for the ASR. Your choice. Light Reading says:
"It doesn't have the performance of the 7600 at the higher end, and it doesn't have the price point of the 7200 at the lower end," Shetty admits. Moreover, he notes the ASR isn't a carrier Ethernet platform like the 7600.
They spent 5 years and $250M but could only come up with a 10 Gbps router?
The routing table size is only 1 M IPv4 routes and 250k IPv6 routes. So that means that it's less scalable than the 7200 and if the world converts to IPv6 tomorrow it's obsolete immediately because the current Internet routing table is ~250,000 routes already. Fire the guy who did that math.
The ASR runs a new version of IOS, called IOS-XE. IOS seems to be breeding faster than tribbles on the USS Enterprise, in spite of Cisco's claims that they would actually reduce the number of IOS versions out there. Notably, IOS-XE is not derived from IOS-XR, in spite of the similar name. Rumor has it that it's the 7200 IOS running as a daemon on Linux. Network World notes the Linux connection and Light Reading says:
Cisco did need to do something new to let the ASR run two copies of its operating system, something Shetty says hasn't been done before in boxes this small.
In fact, it has been done in boxes this small for quite a while (ahem, Vyatta), years in fact. In fact, Vyatta uses true virtualization, rather than just running an old operating system in a single process.
I just about sprayed coffee out my nose this morning when I was reading the Cisco press release:
The Cisco ASR 1000 Series also enables service providers and enterprises to reduce their carbon footprint. By surpassing the capabilities possible in multi-device, multi-vendor solutions, the Cisco ASR 1000 Series dramatically decreases both the architectural complexity of deployment for service providers and enterprises but also their carbon footprints as well. Analysis conducted by Synergy Research found that, when compared to competitive offerings, each implementation of the Cisco ASR 1000 Series can result in carbon footprints savings up to 3754 gallons of gasoline or 17 tons of coal annually.
Gak! Are we really at the point of computing carbon offsets for networking equipment? Are price-per-port or maximum-performance now passé competitive metrics? Coming to an Interop panel near you: "Well, how many cars did your router take off the road??" Or maybe in a future datasheet: "The ASR 1000 has a performance to carbon ratio of 38949 Gbps per coal ton." Sigh...

And here I thought networking was starting to get boring. Between the chicken-man and carbon offsets, I spent the morning laughing...

Open, Open, Open

2008-03-03T17:40:00.000-08:00

It's the word of the day: OPEN. Last week, people started talking about Riverbed opening up its WAN optimization appliances to other 3rd party applications. Does anybody notice a trend? First, it was 3Com. Then Juniper and Cisco. And now Riverbed. Seems like a trend to me. Fortunately, Vyatta has that "open" thing covered.

"I'm not dead yet!"

2008-01-22T16:03:00.000-08:00

Last month, we saw Juniper and Cisco battling to announce that they were going to open up their networking systems. In a desperate bid to remain relevant, 3Com just recently announced that they are shipping the first two major applications for their OSN routers, a 3Com-branded Asterisk-based PBX and a WAN optimization solution from Expand Networks. My hunch is that this was 3Com's equivalent of yelling, "I'm not dead yet!"

To give 3Com credit, it did (pre-)announce its OSN initiative in early 2007, far ahead of either Juniper or Cisco, but far behind Vyatta. Also to be fair, 3Com's OSN really isn't all that interesting. The OSN Flexible Interface Card (FIC) takes the tired route of simply attaching a PC to your router backplane and charging you lots of money for it. In the case of 3Com's OSN, the company wants more than $3000 for a 512 MB RAM, 80 GB HDD system. 3Com's datasheet doesn't tell you the processor speed or type, but rumors are that it's a low-speed Celeron processor. That's a lot to be charging for that.

By the way, that's all before you buy the chassis, any router modules, etc. To compare apples to apples, this would be like buying Vyatta, then buying another $3000 system on which to run these other applications. But yes, you do get the comfort of having it all wrapped in sheet metal and connected with a backplane.

Personally, I'd rather integrate at the software level, not the hardware level. With Vyatta, you can run any open source application on your system. At last count the Debian system had more than 10,000 different packages. Now, in truth, you might have no desire to run MySQL or Emacs on your router, but the fact is that you could do so. And things like Snort, Asterisk (pick your distribution, not just 3Com's), or SpamAssassin are interesting.

So, while OSN uses Linux, it really doesn't give you an open source solution. In most ways, it's the same closed-community country-club offered by Juniper's PSDP. Joining the program and getting the API still requires you to sign paperwork with 3Com.

When will the proprietary boys learn, you simply can't equal the innovation and creativity of a true open-source community. Rather than simply repeating the words "open source" at every opportunity, let's see the code! It is gratifying to see everybody repeating the Vyatta message, though. If you thought that open source networking wasn't going to amount to much, all these Juniper, Cisco, and now 3Com announcements ought to set you thinking. This is such a powerful concept that all the big boys are scared to be left out of the action.

Well, not only is Vyatta not dead yet, we haven't even begun to live. Watch out world, here we come!

Bravo Linux Magazine

2008-01-10T09:14:00.001-08:00

So this morning I came into work and was going through my email. I'm subscribed to the Linux Magazine newsletter, so every day or two I see which articles highlighted in the newsletter might interest me and I go through and read them. This morning, I clicked on a link in one of the newsletter emails and instead of an article got this instead:

I had to laugh out loud. That's so much better than a boring 404 error in the default font.

Bravo Linux Magazine! Thank you for having a sense of humor.

Parents are never "cool"

2007-12-12T15:33:00.000-08:00

December is usually a very light month in the trade news world. Whoda thunk that this week Juniper and Cisco would announce major plans to "go open?"

Juniper started the love-fest with "openness" on Monday with the announcement of its Partner Solution Development Platform (PSDP). Essentially, if you're a big company, and Juniper decides that you're worthy, Juniper will give you the privilege of signing an NDA and paying it yearly fee in order to develop applications that will run on the control plane processor or line cards of its router.

Not wanting to seem like a shrew, Cisco today announced that it too will open up IOS, somehow, someday...

Now, first let's get around to separating the men from the boys. Juniper actually has a real program with a real name (with a real gobbledy-gook four-letter acronym, doncha know). Cisco basically just did an internal reorganization of itself and is handwaving at some future openness, trying to rain on Juniper's parade. The fact is, Cisco has nothing other than an intent to do something, someday.

Now that we have that out of the way, let's look at Juniper. Basically, Juniper's program is an invitation-only affair, like a snobby country-club that would never be so crass as to allow the riff-raff into the building. If you're interested in developing to Juniper's PSDP (aside: am I the only person who says "piss-dip" there?), you can apply, but Juniper has to feel that you're "worthy" enough to be accepted. Once they decide that you're good enough, you get the privilege of signing a bunch of legal paperwork and paying them a hefty fee. After all that, you can write programs in the JunOS-variant of FreeBSD and for their forwarding engine processors.

Sitting here at Vyatta, this all feels a lot like when your parents tried to be cool in high school by adopting the then-current teenage slang vocabulary in order to "get more connected with their kids." Now matter how hard they tried, they always looked foolish and it always ended badly. Simply adopting language doesn't make you cool. Teenagers know this instinctively; multi-billion dollar public companies seem to forget it.

So let me be the first to really question Juniper's program (I won't even consider Cisco's handwaving further). Juniper, I ask you, what really changed here? Juniper, are you saying that previously, if I was a large, multi-billion dollar company like PSDP-pioneer Avaya, and if I came to you and said I'd like to develop something that would run on JunOS, you wouldn't have considered it, and if accepted make me sign NDAs and pay you a lot of money for the privilege? I find that hard to believe. Okay, so maybe you got a bit more formal in the method that you use to process these requests and you gave it a four-letter acronym, but what's really different for users?

See, to really be cool, you have to adopt more than the terminology. If you really want to be open, then go all the way. Post your source code on the Internet like Vyatta has (on purpose this time). Let anybody download it at any time. Without signing an NDA. Without paying you a lot of money. Without even telling you they have done so. Let them release an extension or a hack and do so in a vertical niche market you haven't ever heard of. In short, really open it up to developers large and small and harness the innovation of the whole world, not just the limited imaginations of other multi-billion dollar corporations who are able to pay the annual dues to your country-club.

That would really be cool. Oh, but then you can't claim to be first, because that's already been done.

Gartner's Vendor Influence Curve: The emperor finally has no clothes

2007-12-04T11:40:00.000-08:00

Was just reading an older article in Network World by Jim Duffy: Beware the single vendor as trusted advisor: Gartner. Essentially, Gartner has come up with another tool called the "Vendor Influence Curve" which describes the relationship between a vendor and a customer. The curve basically shows a tradeoff between a vendor's understanding of an enterprise's requirements and the value to the enterprise.

Initially, in the first few stages, there is value to the enterprise in seeking out a vendor that understands the customer's business requirements. In that case, then vendor can help the enterprise make good decisions. At some point, the customer starts to cede decision making power over the vendor, however, and at that point the vendor starts to make decisions in the vendor's self interest. It's Gartner's claim that for many customers, Cisco is at point 4 or 5 on the graph and needs to be reigned in.

Now, obviously, Cisco being who they are, you pretty much have to at least get their opinion on things related to networks. What Gartner is suggesting, however, is that you also get a few more educated second and third opinions. If a single vendor has become your sole "go-to guy" for buying decisions, you're probably making bad strategic decisions for your business and you're probably paying WAAAAYYY too much.

I have to applaud Gartner here for finally saying that the emperor has no clothes, and for Network World for reporting it. The fact is, both of these organizations derive a lot of revenue from Cisco as their own customer (Gartner for analyst services, and Network World for advertising and various other conference sponsorships). Good job, folks, the emperor is, in fact, buck naked.

Virtualization + Open Source = A Revolution in Networking

2007-11-30T16:25:00.000-08:00

Rob said it, not me. Well, actually, I was discussing virtualization and networking with Rob before he said it, so I'm sure that helped clarify his thinking. His conclusion is spot-on.

During the discussion, Rob made a really good point that his blog post didn't state: In today's world, every IT purchase must be understood in light of virtualization. It's simply that big of a fundamental technology. When he first said that to me, I had to take a step back. Is that really true? I wondered. Yup, that is true. Wow. We have come a long way from a few years ago when nobody even knew what virtualization was.

Fortunately, it's fairly easy to see where Vyatta stands on virtualization, at least the current thinking. This is sure to shift in the future as our community drives forward with bigger and better virtualized ideas.

x86 continues to dominate HPC

2007-11-14T09:33:00.000-08:00

This morning, I saw that a new edition of the Top 500 Supercomputers list was released. This blog entry contains the highlights. Of note to me was the number of system that were using x86:

A total of 354 systems (70.8 percent) now use Intel processors. This is up from six months ago (289 systems, 57.8 percent) and represents the largest share for Intel chips in the TOP500 ever. The AMD Opteron family, which passed the IBM Power processors a year ago, remained the second most common processor family with 78 systems (15.6 percent), down from 105 systems (21 percent) six months ago. 61 systems (12.2 percent) use IBM Power processors, down from 85 systems (17 percent) six months ago.

If you total the Intel and AMD contributions, you'll find that x86 represented more than 86% of the Top 500 supercomputers. If there is any doubt that "commodity" hardware is conquering the world, this should set you back a bit. It's true that the #1 and #2 systems on the list are non-x86 systems (PowerPC-based IBM BlueGene, to be exact), but it's clear that systems based on mainstream processors are the norm for those optimizing the cost/performance tradeoff.

I think the situation in high-performance computing (HPC) is indicative of things to come in networking. The #1 position on the Top 500 list is a very purpose-built system using unusual hardware for the utmost in performance. As you go down the list, most of the systems become standard x86 boxes ganged together using Gigabit Ethernet or Infiniband.

In the networking world, we have a couple of different types of systems. We obviously have very high speed L2/L3 switching fabrics. These systems are "fast but dumb," and are all based on ASICs. They will continue to be based on ASICs, but the ASICs will continue to become more commodity, increasingly coming from the likes of Broadcom and Marvell. The other type of system is something I'll call "complex processing," for lack of a better term. These are systems that are "smarter, but slower." They perform deep packet inspection and generally handle higher-level application processing. While these systems may use dedicated ASIC functionality to accelerate specific subfunctions (e.g. crypto hardware), they will increasingly be dominated by x86 processors for the high-level processing.

Of course, Vyatta is developing the software to run those systems and we believe that software will increasingly be open source.

One more reason why Vyatta makes sense

2007-11-05T08:37:00.000-08:00

Back in May, Brad Reese blogged about the The insanity of Cisco software relicensing on Network World's Cisco Subnet Blog. In it, he describes the pinch Cisco is putting on people who buy used Cisco gear.

Now, you'd think that buying used gear would be a reasonable thing to do if you're looking to save money on equipment. In fact, businesses buy used gear all the time. In the real world, I can buy a used car and I can still take it to a certified mechanic. In the real world, I can buy a used fax machine, used copy machine, or a used computer, and still buy a service contract. The act of purchasing the equipment and the service contract are two different decisions, and manufacturers generally honor a used equipment buy.

In Cisco-world, that's not true. Cisco forces everybody to "relicense" its gear when it's acquired on the used or gray markets. The relicensing charges can be as great or greater than the price of purchasing a unit directly from Cisco. Brad specifically says, "Purchasing a Cisco software relicense for a used Cisco 2621XM router costs more than purchasing a Cisco Authorized Factory Refurbished CISCO2621XM-RF unit from Cisco's inventory."

What's up with that? Well, what's up with that is that Cisco is a hardware company and they make their billions (with a B) selling hardware. No hardware sale = no 70% profit margin = no bonus for Cisco execs. In Cisco-world, the used equipment market is a bad, bad place. Consequently, Cisco is out to kill the used equipment market by making it economically unattractive to buy your gear from anybody but Cisco. Sure, they'll sell you a "Cisco Authorized Factory Refurb," but it's still going to cost you.

Several Vyatta customers have come to us after facing this insanity. They figured they could pick up some used Cisco gear fairly cheap and then call Cisco for a support contract. No deal. Before buying Cisco SmartNet, you'll have to "relicense" your gear.

Consequently, for less than the price of a Cisco "relicense" fee, Vyatta customers have been able to switch. Welcome to the real world. Welcome to Vyatta. If you have switched, you might want to write Cisco a Dear John letter.

Ben King rocks

2007-10-31T10:16:00.000-07:00

Ashlee Vance over at The Register just posted what has to be one of the funniest press stories on the VC3 launch. I was laughing out loud. My guess is that Ashlee was laughing out loud about the Dear John page.

As icing on the proverbial cake, the comments section saw some back-and-forth between the typical Cisco fanboys and those who know the real deal.

Somebody named Michael H delivered the first blow:

Their entire product line is based around commodity PC hardware. Performance is horrid compared to gear from any real vendor, where traffic is switched at a hardware level using dedicated ASICs.

The whitepaper on their site favorably compares the performance of a modern PC to an old, small Cisco router designed to route T1s (1.5mbit/s), something even a 486 could handle.

This brings out the old "Cisco uses dedicated ASICs" stuff (again). In fact, as we have talked about numerous times in this blog, that's simply untrue. Many of Cisco's low and mid-range routers use software forwarding (everything from Linksys up through the 7200 uses software, I'm told by the former Cisco employees now working at Vyatta, sometimes on MIPS-based cores, and other times on more pedestrian processors). I'm assuming "the whitepaper" on the Vyatta site actually refers to the Tolly test report comparing Vyatta running on a Dell PowerEdge 860 to the Cisco 2821. The 2821 is hardly "old," being part of the recently-introduced ISR family.

Ben King then makes one of the best replies:

I have used Vyatta and Cisco extensively, and I have probably completed one of the larger Vyatta deployments by a UK company (company WAN spanning 6 countries).

A few responses:

1) Vyatta vs Cisco, I am sure there is a point where the high end Ciscos out perform PC opensource based solutions, however at the commodity level this simply isn't the case. Bang for buck when you look at what you get with Vyatta feature and performance wise the equivalent Cisco is way way more expensive.

2) Vyatta vs Other Opensource, the argument is absolutely right, Vyatta does nothing that you can't get anywhere else on the opensource community, we actually use a Debian/iptables/imq solution elsewhere in our ISP business very successfully, and I would recommend if you are doing anything specialist you stick with the bespoke route. However Vyatta is extremely quick to deploy, give me a bare metal server, a Vyatta CD, and I will have an installed working Vyatta router with base config in 10 minutes, you simply can't do this with a custom build.

3) Cisco vs Opensource, long raging argument, we run our albeit small ISP all on Linux opensource routing equipment because its cheaper. Where Cisco wins though is support and the high end gear.

4) Support. Where Vyatta really wins is the support, if you decided go with Vyatta pay the subscription fee and get the support, its really superb.

Ben has blogged about Vyatta and his experience before. It's a good read. Ben, if you're out there, drop me a note (dave at Vyatta). I'd like to hook you up with some press people.

Answering Terry Slattery

2007-10-31T08:21:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago, Brad Reese over at Network World's Cisco Subnet blogged about the VC3 release. The posting did a good job of talking about Vyatta and some of the advantages we have (along with a nice highlight of the Dear John web page).

Brad then asked Terry Slattery, CTO of Netcordia, to comment on Vyatta and the announcement. Terry did so in his blog at the Netcordia web site.

In response, I sent a note to both Brad and Terry with some of my thoughts on the points that Terry raised. Now, it's important to remember that both Brad and Terry are hardcore Cisco alums. Brad was instrumental in putting together the Cisco training and education program. Terry worked on some fundamental IOS features around things like the CLI. (Remember tab-completion in IOS? That was his.)

So, here was my response:

Dear Brad,

I recently read your article quoting some of Terry Slattery's blog post about Vyatta. Terry is clearly an educated skeptic, which is wise when it comes to networking. There are many good answers to Terry's questions, however, and I felt compelled to provide them in order to clear the air and help others who may be asking themselves the same thing.

First, let me say that often debates of this nature get turned into all-or-nothing contests where the participants want to suggest that their particular point of view will reign supreme and the opposing point of view is utterly bankrupt. I don't believe this, and I don't think Terry does either. Like it or not, the world is gray. When this debate is long over, neither Cisco nor Vyatta will have 100% market share. And Vyatta doesn't need 100% share in order to be a success to our customers and the market.

As a background to this, I'll say that Vyatta has customers in just about every market segment you can think of. A partial list includes small business, medium enterprise, hosting service providers, VoIP providers, wireless service providers, federal and municipal government, financial, educational, media, retail, manufacturing, legal, health care, and aerospace. Some of these customers are documented in case studies on the Vyatta web site. In certain cases, we're in branch offices, and other times at the cores of networks.

Okay, let's get to Terry's comments...

"For small remote site use, it may well be acceptable to use the Vyatta router, provided you don't also need a local switch and voice capability, which the ISR can provide."

Let's parse this out. First, it depends what you call "small." It's a frequent tactic in technology arguments to suggest that something would only work for somebody's grandmother, but not in "real life." (The proprietary operating system vendors used to claim this about Linux, for instance.) This is absolutely not the case with Vyatta.

While it's true that there are features in the ISR that are not (yet) present in Vyatta, not all customers need those. Many customers prefer to keep their voice infrastructure products, even if VoIP-based, separate than their data infrastructure products--the network still carries the traffic, but the products are non-integrated. This is not to suggest that integration is not valued by some, only that it is not valued by all. Vyatta is perfectly happy today addressing the part of the market that doesn't need all the ISR widgets and doodads. We'll add the widgets and doodads over time, too, and we'll have a better solution for that part of the market.

Second, I'm a bit flummoxed about the cost structure of the integrated switching modules for the ISR. Looking at the web site of a large online merchant, I can buy an NM-16ESW, 16-port Fast Ethernet switching module for the ISR, for $1076. A Cisco Catalyst 2960-24TT, 24-port Fast Ethernet switch with two Gigabit Ethernet uplinks, only costs $856. And the 2960 is a top-shelf option. If I'm willing to forgo the Cisco logo, I can get a Netgear JFS524, 24-port Fast Ethernet switch for only $99. While Cisco charges 10x the price of the Netgear for the ISR module, it makes up for it by giving you fewer ports... Okay, so that's not a fair comparison. How about, while Cisco charges 25% more for the NM-16ESW than the 2960, it makes up for it by giving you fewer ports.

"If your interface is a set of T1s or similar speed links, then software based forwarding will work well (higher speeds are possible, depending on the hardware you use, as demonstrated in the Tolly Group comparison). At higher speeds on bigger boxes, Cisco will win -- it's simply a game of moving packets between interfaces at the highest speed the hardware will enable. And Cisco has the hardware at the high end."

It's important to place Vyatta in context. A lot of people suggest that Vyatta is a toy because it can't route for the backbone of the Internet. It's true that Vyatta won't be used by a tier-1 carrier to handle the Internet backbone anytime soon, but this was never a claim Vyatta made. We have been very clear about our performance claims and have published a lot of data on our web site substantiating our claims. (As a side note, it's a lot harder to lie about performance claims when you're an open source vendor and people can simply download the code and test it for themselves. It's much easier to bluff on performance issues when testing a claim costs thousands of dollars to buy the device under test.)

It's also important to note that many Cisco mid-range routers are software-based. The whole ISR series, in fact, routes packets on a MIPS processor. The Cisco 7200 is also software-based.

At the end of the day, the proof is in the pudding, and Vyatta's pudding tastes pretty good. The Tolly test actually demonstrates that Vyatta works well even for large links, far exceeding T1 speeds. In the test, Vyatta showed a minimum forwarding performance at 64-byte packets of approximately 280 Mbps. This was double the performance of the 2821. The maximum performance was over 2 Gbps at larger packet sizes (greater than 1024-bytes). And that performance was limited in this case by the two Gigabit Ethernet ports. Had we added more ports, we could have gone even faster. We didn't do this because Cisco charges over $2,500 (street) for the 1-port Gigabit Ethernet card for the ISR series (HWIC-1GE). It simply wasn't cost effective to go further.

Finally, this test was performed with on a 2.8 GHz Celeron processor--something that is basically obsolete at this point in time. Faster processors will deliver better performance, at a consequent increase in cost.

This is not to suggest that ASIC-based forwarding doesn't have its place. Certainly, ASICs can provide a huge increase in speed (along with a huge decrease in flexibility). If you're trying to route traffic at terabits per second in the Internet core, you'll need ASICs to do it, no doubt about it. But many (most?) people aren't trying to do that. Which is one reason that Cisco 2800 ISRs outsell CRS-1s in volume.

So, to summarize, while ASICs are a great match for anything running at more than 10 Gbps, many networking systems operate at much lower speeds. This includes anything in the Cisco 1800 to Cisco 7200 range. If you're buying these products, Vyatta is a good match and can probably save you a lot of money. We have had customers replace every Cisco model in this range with a Vyatta solution and we're confident that we can solve many problems in this space.

"Some of the other features that I didn't see listed in about 30 minutes of poking around the Vyatta web site and forums: QoS, MPLS, and Netflow/sFlow/IPFIX."

You didn't need to poke around that long. Vyatta has a wiki page with a complete list of features that we don't yet support that people have told us they need: http://www.vyatta.com/twiki/bin/view/Community/TopEnhancements We're committed to being transparent about what we have and don't have and allowing the community to help prioritize where we go moving forward. On this page, you're welcome to vote for features you think are important.

So, yes, Vyatta doesn't (yet) include those features and a whole lot of other ones. That said, QoS is currently scheduled to be released in 1Q08. MPLS and Netflow have been highly requested but are currently unscheduled.

"The question in my mind is whether they will be able to implement the features that customers need in order to be competitive with the likes of Cisco and the other router vendors (don't forget about 3Com, Adtran, and the other smaller router players)."

Pulling a paraphrased quote from another day and time, "The question in my mind is whether Linux will be able to implement the features that customers need in order to be competitive with the likes of Windows, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, and a bunch of other smaller UNIXes." I'd just submit by analogy that open source has proved itself very capable of competing with proprietary offerings over time. While you may be correct that Vyatta can't meet a particular customer need today, open source adapts quickly--it's sort of the Borg of the technology universe. Would you honestly want to bet against open source in the long run? If the answer is no, then perhaps the only debate is about timing, and that's where I'd remind you that customers, like the world, are not black and white. They all have different needs and desires.

"I'm curious just how big a network a single Vyatta can handle. Leave a comment if you know of any big ones."

Vyatta can handle fairly large networks. Try us. We have multiple customers running full tables with more than 10 BGP peers. In fact, given that Cisco often charges $5000 per GB of memory and Vyatta leverages the x86 ecosystem to provide a GB of memory for less than $100, Vyatta customers can handle large networks without breaking the bank. We have customers that have purchased more than 100 systems and we have established the partnerships with Hyperic and Alterpoint to help manage networks this large and larger.

"* The Tolly Group comparison was done with UDP packets, which would may not take advantage of a cache that the Cisco might use to improve the performance of TCP. It would be interesting to see the same test done using a set of TCP flows."

The Tolly test was a standard RFC 2544 performance test. In fact, most packet forwarding tests are run with UDP rather than TCP because it makes it easier to set up test equipment (a Spirent SmartBits in this case). I didn't realize that Cisco has problems with UDP. I don't think that using TCP would have changed the outcome, but perhaps it would. If somebody has data showing that Cisco has a UDP deficiency, we'd be happy to look at it.

Cheers,

-- Dave Roberts
Vice President of Strategy and Marketing
Vyatta, Inc.

VC3 has left the building

2007-10-31T08:11:00.000-07:00

Well, we got Vyatta Community Edition 3 (VC3) out the door on Monday. That was big. We're shooting to release a community edition twice a year. VC2 came out in February. The downloads have been phenomenal.

Last week

2007-09-05T10:40:00.000-07:00

I'm glad last week is over. There was just too much going on here at Vyatta. In addition to releasing Vyatta Subscription and Community Editions 2.2, we also moved our office from San Mateo to Belmont, CA. The offices are within spitting distance of each other, so it really isn't as big of a move as it sounds. We're now about a quarter mile from Oracle world HQ in Redwood Shores. The city boundaries right here are strange and they all come together in some strange harmonic convergence that results in a small move jumping from city-to-city wildly.

We finally grew out of the original Vyatta bunker. We just didn't have sitting room for anybody anymore. In the new office, we have room to spread out, and (most importantly!) more conference rooms. We only had two conference rooms in the old building and it seemed like somebody was always in both of them. We had taken to calling a small patio table in the courtyard of the old building "Conference Room 3." That worked well during the spring/summer, but it's going to get rainy here in a few months, so that solution had a definitely lifetime associated with it.

The folks here that coordinated the move did an excellent job for the rest of us. It was as smooth and painless as you could possibly imagine, though there were certainly a lot of hiccups in making that happen. The planning was perfect. All my boxes arrived right where they were supposed to and I walked in yesterday and just plugged in my PC and got to work. Easy!

So, mixed in with all that packing for the move, we also released version 2.2 of the Subscription Edition and Community Edition this week. This was a big release. We ended up posting a full ISO because the changes were so significant and we wanted all the new downloaders to have the latest and greatest. Unfortunately, we had a hiccup with the package upgrade instructions for existing users that caused some confusion. Hopefully, we got that all straightened out. We had a last minute change in the procedure from the VC2.2 beta release and we also missed a change to a package name from the Subscription Edition to the Community Edition in the release notes. As much as we try to double and triple check things, it seems like something always gets through. Unfortunately, it's never the thing you expect.

In any case, if you're upgrading from an earlier version, follow the instructions in the latest version of the release notes on the web site. Those are now correct and you should have no problems. If you have any trouble, post to the vyatta-users mailing list.

SSE4 adds CRC32 and string instructions

2007-09-05T09:36:00.000-07:00

I have written a few times before about how standard microprocessors are increasing in power very quickly. This morning, I was scanning a whitepaper from Intel about upcoming SSE4 instruction set additions. In addition to some string searching instructions that could improve the performance of everything from databases to virus scanners to intrusion detection systems, Intel has also included a CRC32 instruction. CRC32 is used a lot as an error detection technique on low-level communication protocols. For instance, the data of every Ethernet or WiFi frame is protected by a CRC32. The addition of this instruction to the x86 instruction set is significant as it is a recognition that data communications is an important application area, whether for a server or a piece of network infrastructure. As I have stated before, commodity silicon continues to grow more powerful...

LinuxWorld Postmortem

2007-08-17T16:02:00.000-07:00

I survived. I really did. I didn't think I would, but I did. Yes, LinuxWorld was that tiring. I was at the show all day on Tuesday, a lot of Wednesday, and all Thursday afternoon. Thankfully, the show was lively and had grown substantially since the last time I was there a couple of years ago. People were everywhere, talking open source and what it could do for you. The conference sessions were well attended. This all bodes well for both the overall IT economy and open-source in particular.

The Vyatta Open Arcade Classic went off perfectly. Tuesday at noontime, I wasn't so sure how things were going to work out. When the company that rented us the classic video games arrived to drop them off at the Thirsty Bear, Defender wouldn't power up. That was going to be a big problem because Larry Augustin was almost maniacal that he wanted to play Defender. The company apologized and said they'd go back to the warehouse and get a Galaga game. That seemed like a reasonable compromise. Later in the afternoon, they returned with both a Galaga game and a replacement circuit board that they thought might fix the Defender game. Fortunately, it worked and both games were up and running for the party--bonus!

The party was very well attended. We had a lot of people tell us it was the best party at LinuxWorld. People loved the both the theme and the location. The loft of the Thirsty Bear was packed, but not such that people couldn't move. There was the right amount of chit-chatting and hardcore game playing. I met many people I had previously only interacted with online--it was nice to put names with faces. We cautiously called this the "inaugural" LinuxWorld Vyatta party, but I'm pretty confident this has become the "first annual" LinuxWorld Vyatta party.

My favorite line of the party happened early in the evening. Jeremy Allison was just starting to play his first game of Asteroids. Jeremy dropped in the token, hit the Play button, and addressed the screen. As soon as his ship appeared on the first level, Jeremy mutters "Hmmmm... there are a lot more rocks than I remember..." Indeed. Ain't that always the case.

Thanks to everybody who attended. We were grateful for all the new friends and old friends who dropped by. We're particularly grateful to our open-source "luminaries:" Jeremy Allison, Larry Augustin, Simon Crosby, Mike Schroepfer, and Jacob Taylor. You guys were great. The final high-scores for the night were as follows. Over $5000 total will be donated to the list of projects and organizations listed on behalf of the high score holders, the open-source luminaries, and Vyatta.

GAME	PROJECT	WINNER	HIGH SCORE
PAC MAN	SQLite	Kevin Weiss	28510
Defender	Samba	Larry Augustin	35575
Asteroids	Free Software Foundation	Jerry DelRio	16860
Donkey Kong	Ext	Peder Ulander	18500
Centipede	Linux Foundation	JC Utter	38018

On Thursday afternoon, I presented a conference session titled The State of Open Source Networking: Where It's At, and Where It's Going. The session was during the last timeslot of the conference and I was a bit worried that nobody would show up. It's pretty common for everybody to leave the show early on the last day and being "tail-end Charlie" typically means you're talking to a crowd of one or two attendees. Surprisingly, that was not the case. Many attendees showed up and seemed to both understand and receive the message I was preaching.

So, chalk up another successful event.

Secret Society Alert: The Vyatta Open Arcade Classic

2007-07-25T17:18:00.000-07:00

Well, it has been quite a while since we had a good, old-fashioned Vyatta Secret Society party. In the early days of the company, we'd have a get-together every couple months of something we called the Vyatta Secret Society. We were still in stealth mode at the time and didn't even have a basic web site. We'd meet with some early friends of the company to discuss what we were up to and seek input. After Vyatta launched the original beta version of the Vyatta system in February 2005, we had to decide whether to continue having "Secret" Society meetings. We thought it was a good idea to continue, even if the Society was no longer very secret, and there have been several good events since that time.

Well, get ready again. This time we're planning the Vyatta Open Arcade Classic, a video game competition for open-source "charities." You can find all the details on the Vyatta web site. You might note that LinuxWorld and the NGDC Conference are taking place in San Francisco that same week. The event is located very close to Moscone center. If you're planning on attending either show or conference and you like classic video game, open source, or want to meet some open-source luminaries, please drop by.

The thrust of the event is playing classic arcade style stand-up video games for open source project charities. We have five classic video games:

Asteroids
Defender
Centipede
PacMan
Donkey Kong

We have also selected five open-source "luminaries" to work with us. Each luminary has selected an open source project as a "charity:"

Luminary	Project Charity
Jeremy Allison, Samba project	Free Software Foundation
Larry Augustin, Founder of VA Linux	Samba
Simon Crosby, CTO of XenSource	Linux Foundation
Mike Schroepfer, VP of engineering, Mozilla	SQLite
Jacob Taylor, CTO of SugarCRM	extjs

Basically, the drinks and appetizers at the event are free, but you'll have to pay to play the original stand-up versions of Asteroids, Donkey Kong, Defender, Pac Man, or Centipede. Vyatta will be donating $1000 to each of the five charities. Additionally, we'll donate an equal split of all the proceeds from the game players and we'll make the donation in the name of each of the high-score winners for each of the games.

In short, this is going to be a very fun event with a great opportunity to mix and mingle with some top-notch open-source people.

You might notice that Larry is playing for the Samba folks, and Jeremy Allison, from the Samba project, is playing for the Free Software Foundation. I originally asked Larry what his project charity would be and he said "Samba" and directed me to Jeremy to get the details worked out. Jeremy took one look at the event and said he wanted to play, too, but for the Free Software Foundation. Go figure.

Stalinist Central Planning Doesn't Work

2007-06-22T17:27:00.000-07:00

I was reading through some blogs today and Dana Blankenhorn's posting at ZDnet, The telecom revolution will not be televised, caught my eye. In it, Dana describes becoming "ticked off" at Maria Bartiromo on CNBC as she described the NxtComm show, saying how "'the industry’s heavyweights' were there to 'decide on the future of telecommunications.'"

A few months ago, I was being interviewed by a reporter about Vyatta and why I thought we would be successful. I told the reporter very directly that I believed Vyatta would succeed because (paraphrasing) "...the world has conclusively proven that Stalinist central planning doesn't work." At this point, Tom McCafferty, eavesdropping in the next cube over from me in the Vyatta office, started laughing hysterically.

After the call, Tom stuck his head over the cube wall. "Did I just hear you say that Cisco and Juniper are Stalinists," Tom asked?

"Well, sort of," I replied. "No, I didn't mean that they are communists or have killed millions of people, but only that the future is not served up as the direct result of a grand plan hatched by the strategy office of the market incumbent. I was trying to communicate the fact that companies with large amounts of market power often want to strong-arm their customers into doing what is best for the company, not what is best for the users."

"I was trying to make the point that open-source has a huge community component to finding its direction that proprietary systems just don't," I said. "Therefore it's more responsive to users. Because the technology is open, anybody with a good idea can change it or extend it, unleashing all sorts of creativity that never gets off the ground."

Tom nodded his head and laughed. "I still thinks its hilarious that you just called Cisco Stalinst," he said, sitting back down.

The reality is, it's the same idea that Dana picked up on in his blog. Describe it how you want---"bottom up innovation," "The telecomm revolution will not be televised," or "Stalinist central planning doesn't work"---it's all the same idea. Everybody is finally asking themselves, "By what right do 'the industry’s heavyweights' get to 'decide on the future of telecommunications?'" Is that something users even want? Is that good for anybody but the "industry heavyweights?"

While many people in proprietary software PR assignments like to suggest that somehow open source software is "communist" in nature because the code is open and given away, I contend that in many ways it's very capitalist (Eric Raymond has described it as something entirely different, a "gift culture," in the Cathedral and the Bazaar). The open nature allows many more people to shape the future, both users themselves as well as other vendors. The fact that there is more competition keeps everybody honest and prevents anybody from strong-arming anybody else. Companies that provide value get paid. Those that don't disappear. Don't like the future somebody else proposed? Create a new one. If people like yours better, you win. Don't add value and you can't make a buck, then you die and people pick up where you left off, without orphaned customers or the like. Whatever happens, the "industry heavyweights" aren't allowed to "decide on the future of telecommunications" without everybody else having a say-so in the matter.

So, I'll repeat it again: Stalinist central planning doesn't work. And Dana is right that the telecom revolution won't be televised. It might be carried over a VoIP call through an Asterisk PBX running over a Vyatta network, however.

Nice Vyatta review

2007-06-18T13:44:00.000-07:00

Nick Davey reviewed some of the new features in Vyatta Community 2. One thing I like about Nick is that he's very straightforward and honest in his reviews. The Vyatta system isn't perfect (yet), and Nick tells you what he likes and doesn't like. Most of the things in his wish list are features we have in various stages of planning an execution.

And don't worry, Nick, no need to apologize.

Sun on software patents

2007-06-18T13:11:00.000-07:00

I have posted some thoughts about patents before in this blog. I just stumbled across a posting by Sun's CTO, Greg Papadopoulos (yes, I checked the spelling of that 3 times), discussing software patents. Greg makes the point that in today's world of software, copyright is probably a more powerful instrument for software authors than patents. Further, copyrighted code that is freely distributed is better at serving the public interest in terms of teaching others about your invention than is a patent. As the holder of multiple patents, I'll agree with him wholeheartedly. The fact is, nobody but lawyers read patents unless there is lots of litigation on the table. I can barely understand my own patents. Code is soooo much better at communicating how things really should work.

In his posting, Greg, of course, pats Sun on the back for some of the things they have been doing with ZFS, OpenSolaris, and Java, and rightly so, I believe. The fact is, Sun has been embracing open source quite a lot. My favorite quote:

In case you haven't noticed, driving to a state of complete FOSS is exactly what we are doing at Sun. With some narrow exceptions, all of our software efforts are or will be under a FOSS license, and we will actively build and participate in communities around these code bases, and work as transparently as we possibly can.

In case you didn't notice, we added some Sun hardware to our Vyatta Ready hardware list. In fact, Sun called us to do the certification. That's quite embracing, I believe.

Lots-o-cores

2007-06-15T13:36:00.000-07:00

In previous blog postings, I have written about the myth that networking systems must rely on special-purpose ASICs or network processors, and I have pondered what will be achievable as MIPS become more and more free. Today, ZDNet posted a story discussing Intel's stated direction to deliver processors with 80 or more cores. While not here today, this represents a huge jump in commodity computing performance. What's interesting is that the article suggests an idea that I have had for a while: what if instead of having 80 x86 cores, you instead had 50 x86 cores along with 30 specialty cores? Some of those specialty cores could perform crypto operations, perhaps, or rapid pattern matching for anti-virus, anti-spam, or intrusion detection and prevention functions. Today, there are already x86-compatible processors from VIA Technologies that contain hardware crypto acceleration operations.

As you can see, the possibilities are quite limitless for commodity technology. Thankfully, Vyatta will be delivering software that will help take advantage of these technology advances to run your networks faster, for less money, and with the freedom of open-source.

Vyatta CAREs

2007-06-04T10:27:00.000-07:00

In our last installment, I talked about receiving horrible customer service from a 1-800-florist. I said that I'd look at Vyatta's customer service process and discuss how my flower-buying experience could have been so much better had I been working with Vyatta and not the company I originally chose to buy from. Unfortunately, Vyatta just doesn't do flowers and so I didn't have that option. If we did, I'm sure I would have been satisfied.

Inside Vyatta, we have a slide that goes in our internal presentations that talks about our primary corporate mission. We believe that Vyatta's success is directly tied to the size and health of the community that surrounds us. Our mission is therefore to "Help users around the world develop a passion for Vyatta." Nope, it isn't to grow our revenues by a given percentage, get the company profitable, or IPO the company. We believe those things will all come in time if we're successful in executing to our primary mission.

Yes, I know that you're probably jaded and you have sat through corporate feel-good presentations that profess some of the same thoughts. In our case, though, I think we really mean it. The reason is that Vyatta fundamentally exists as an open-source company. We don't have a lot of proprietary technology that we hold hostage and only allow our customers to access by paying us money. We try to make money by developing quality code and then providing our users a set of value-added services that they really want to pay for.

I'll tell you that coming from a long history of proprietary networking companies, this inversion of your business model is quite sobering. It forces you to evaluate your real value to customers and puts things into stark perspective. Whereas things like customer service are a cost-center at other companies (something to be minimized), they are part of Vyatta's fundamental product offerings (revenue to be maximized).

I should note that Vyatta subscriptions offer more than just technical support. Vyatta subscriptions include:

New features and functions through the life of the subscription
Bug fixes
Software downloads and automated updates (ISO and update repository)
Case Management (add/edit/review)
Subscription Knowledge Base
Research Tools and Info
Professional Technical Assistance Center (TAC) Operations

Vyatta also offers a set of consulting services that can help you get Vyatta deployed in your network and configured just the way you want it.

To deliver all the above, we rely on building a first-rate customer service organization. We have a set of values that we demand of that organization (and the whole company, really) that ensure you have the best experience possible. First, let's recognize that no matter how perfect a company is, there are always going to be times when things go wrong. If you're an Internet florist, then sometimes the flowers are going to arrive wilted and looking sickly. If you're creating open-source networking software, there are sometimes going to be bugs or installation problems. Assuming that everybody is striving to keep those problems to a minimum, the real winners are the companies that know how to make things right when they inevitably go wrong.

To help Vyatta deliver repeatable, excellent customer service experiences, we came up with a simple acronym, CARE, that describes the behaviors we want Vyatta employees to use when dealing with anybody. Here's the explanation:

Courteous: We truly appreciate the opportunity to serve our customers and partners. We let them know that each and every time we interact with them through timely, courteous and professional communications. We respect their technical knowledge and adjust our procedures accordingly. We strive to make their day better.
Accessible: We insure that the customer or partner has our name, phone number, email and office hours. We respond promptly when they contact us and we proactively communicate updates. We escalate willingly when they request it. We proactively bring in additional resources as necessary.
Reliable: We clearly communicate what we will do and when we will do it. Then, we do what we said we would do, when we said we would do it. We fully and completely meet our commitments on-time, each and every time.
Empowered: We take ownership of the issue and we act. We never pass the buck. We never say “that’s not my department” or “you need to call…” When we need to make a quick decision, we do the right thing and sort out the details later.

Now, things like being Courteous may sound trite. You may think to yourself, "Well, of course being courteous is part of customer service. What is the alternative, being discourteous?" While it's obvious that being polite is part of the goal, being truly courteous goes beyond good manners. It also means things like, "We respect their technical knowledge and adjust our procedures accordingly." This was born out of an irritation that just about everybody at Vyatta has had with other technology customer service departments.

For example, whenever I call my broadband access provider with a problem, the level 1 technician always asks me to reboot my computer. Being a technical guy who builds IP networking equipment for a living, by the time I call tech support, I already know most of the problem, and rebooting my computer isn't part of the problem. I have found myself more than once begging to be put through to the level 3 tech support person in order to help the company help themselves, because something in its network is wonky and I know it but they have yet to figure it out. All of us wish they would annotate our customer service records with a little flag that means "this guy knows what he's talking about, so dispense with the 'reboot your PC' thing and patch them directly to level 3 support whenever he calls." At Vyatta, we strive to work with you at the level you're at. If you're a networking novice, we'll talk to you in terms you can understand. If you've built world-class networks, we'll treat you like the expert you are.

Next, we're accessible. If you want to escalate to somebody, we're more than willing to do that, all the way to the CEO if necessary. We honestly hope it never comes to that (if it does, then something else is very wrong), but if you want that, we're willing to do it. We'll make sure you have all our phone numbers and email addresses. My direct voice number is +1-650-350-3148. My email is dave at Vyatta.

Being reliable seems like table-stakes, but it's amazing how many companies aren't. They say they'll call and they don't. They say something will get done, but then you find yourself calling back again and again, re-explaining yourself to a new person who has never heard of you or your problem, and the cycle repeats. Vyatta wants to break that cycle.

The biggest one for me is empowerment. Many organizations use outsourced customer service departments to keep costs low (because customer service is a cost center, not a product). While many people will bemoan the low skill levels of outsourced call center operators, I think the biggest problem is that they are given no empowerment to do the right thing for the customer. Typically, the organizations that run these outsourced operations have very strict "scripts" that are developed in conjunction with the companies for which they work. While it's fine to try to use scripts to increase efficiency and repeatability of standard solutions, you also need to give people the latitude to go "off script" when required. Sometimes a given problem just doesn't fit the script or the computer system and the right answer isn't to tell the customer that you can't help them or to call another department. Customer service reps need to be able to work with customers to come to quick resolution and then work offline to make the right thing happen without putting the customer in the middle of it.

Now, I should also state that putting principles like this to work requires that you have a staff that is mature and responsible. All Vyatta's customer service techs are experienced building and supporting large networks. They get it. We don't stick people in tech support as the job for newbies that nobody else wants. Our technicians aren't wet-behind-the-ears recent-graduates with entry-level positions, hoping they can make it out of the bull-pen to that other job they really want. Our people love delivering great support to you. Because we hire mature professionals, we can give them full discretion on how to handle cases.

So far, these principles are serving us quite well. We have been receiving rave reviews from our customers. A small set of comments we have received to date includes:

“The incredible level of their support – even their first level of support, compared to ANY other place I’ve dealt with … it’s just outstanding.”

“As I've said in previous mails, I'm so impressed with your support and how committed your people are in solving the problem rather than closing the case.”

“[Your] expertise and willingness to help me solve my problem was excellent. Vyatta provided excellent technical assistance in my time of crisis. Thanks, Vyatta for an excellent product.”

“[You] have been excellent about all the support we have received, and [you do] a great job in taking ownership of all cases/tickets.”

So, let's take a quick second to examine how these principles could have saved me as a 1-800-florist customer.

First, let's notice that I wasn't angry when I initially called. In spite of the problem with the product (partially dead flowers), I just wanted a credit and I would have probably used the florist again in the future. Instead, I'm blogging about my bad experience for the whole Internet as a case study in bad service and I'll go out of my way to use somebody else.

It was clear that when I called the first customer service rep, Bernadette, she had been given guidelines that said that if anybody isn't satisfied with his order, offer to resend it first. If that doesn't work, promise him a partial credit. That's fine insofar as it goes, but in this case I had already made things right by ordering from another florist. I didn't want them to send yet more flowers (which they incidentally did anyway). A full refund, while not the most desirable for the company, should have been an easy thing to get. In fact, they had promised it a couple of times to me in writing, on their web site and in the email confirming my order. The fact that Bernadette wasn't empowered to give me that is poor planning on the part of 1-800-florist.

After I felt lied to and called the second customer service rep, Bob, he should have made it right on the spot. He told me that he might not be able to cancel the redelivery. Even if that was true, he should have said that they'd be redelivering it anyway as a free gift to me, even as he gave me 100% credit for my order. The fact that 1-800-florist can or can't cancel a redelivery order at a certain point is its problem, not mine. If he couldn't cancel it, he should have made it appear that it was a bonus gift and not a problem.

The fatal mistake Bob made was asking me to call him back after the first customer service rep had gotten out of my record to allow him to work. The fact that his computer system doesn't allow two customer service people to work in a record at the same time isn't my problem. If need be, he should have copied all my information onto a pad of paper and then gone back later that day and done whatever computer system gymnastics were required to give me what I wanted. Asking a customer to call back later means that you're forcing the problem back on the customer and not taking responsibility for it.

Finally, I asked to speak with Bob's supervisor. The supervisor had the nerve to decline to speak with me. That's simply inexcusable. While it may be inconvenient to take the call, as a first-level customer service supervisor, that's one of the most critical parts of your job. Finally, she acquiesced to at least calling me back, but Bob wouldn't give out her contact info so that I could contact her if she failed to do so. In effect, the company was saying, "trust us, in spite of what you have just seen of our poor customer service, we'll really make it right." That's too much to ask in an escalation situation, because in that case you know right then that trust is eroding quickly. Ideally, with a large customer service department, a supervisor is always on hand to speak with a customer, but I wouldn't have expected a director or somebody higher up the chain to have been accessible on a moment's notice. What really got me angry, however, was that the system was rigged to deny me the right of appeal to a higher power. I sometimes understand that low-level folks are battling computer systems that won't cooperate and process manuals that don't give them latitude and I typically try to cut them some slack, but I have no sympathy for a system that tries to cut me off and retain the power in the relationship.

Whew! This has been a long one, but hopefully it helped you understand the philosophy that we have at Vyatta. We're committed to delivering great customer support as a part of every interaction we have with you, whether you're a paying subscription customer or just a prospective customer asking us about our product. We want you to be satisfied. We want to "Help users around the world develop a passion for Vyatta." We think CARE helps us achieve that. From the feedback we're receiving, it's working.

1-800-horrible-customer-service

2007-05-17T11:14:00.000-07:00

Grrrr.... I hate bad customer support. I just got off the phone after having one of those experiences. Fortunately, through the miracle of modern Internet technology, I get to work through my frustration by blogging about it. Okay, here's the setup...

Last Sunday was Mother's Day here in the USA. Like all dutiful dads with kids, I definitely needed to get some flowers for my wife and my mom. Being a busy guy, prone to forgetting these things and wanting to lock things in, and with a fast Internet connection, I went online a couple weeks ago and ordered two flower bouquets from a large national florist with a web presence.

On Friday, the flowers arrived. My mom and wife were thrilled. Unfortunately, I was not. My wife's bouquet looked bad. The flowers were already starting to turn and looked bleak. My wife got them into water and we went about our business.

By Monday afternoon, it looked horrible. The flowers had all lost most of the petals and were well on their way to being completely dead. Well, I didn't like that one bit. I called a different florist and had my wife delivered another bouquet, which looked great. I got double-bonus-points for being a thoughtful husband.

Okay, so at this point no problem. Hey, flowers die. They are organic living things. Flowers simply aren't an exact science. I looked on the shipping confirmation email I had received and it said "...your satisfaction is guaranteed," and was ostensibly sent by "Julie L. Kaufman, Director of Customer Service." (Or by a big CRM system masquerading as Julie. Who knows if Julie even saw the template text.) I figured I'd just call the customer support line for the florist from whom I had ordered them and get them to issue me a refund. No biggie, worst case Julie would take care of me, right?

I called customer service this morning. Fortunately, the support line wasn't busy and I didn't wait any time in the queue.

"Hi, sir, I'm Bernadette," she said. "How can I help you?"

"Hello," I said. "I just bought a bouquet for my wife for Mother's Day. Unfortunately, the flowers looked horrible when I received them on Friday and they were all dead by Monday afternoon. I'd like a refund, please."

After taking the information such as my name and the order number, the customer service rep informed me that I couldn't have a full refund.

"I can have the flowers redelivered and I can either give you a 50% credit to be used in the future or a 20% refund," she said.

"Well, I really don't want a redelivery," I replied. "I already ordered new flowers from somebody else and I don't need a replacement. Can't you just give me a complete refund?"

"Hang on, sir. Let me check." After 30 seconds, "No," she said, "that's not possible."

Grumble. "What's up with this?" I'm thinking to myself. "There's no way you can give me a 100% refund?"

"No, sir, that isn't possible. Either 50% credit or 20% refund."

"Give me the 20% refund," I said, thinking "...and I'm never ordering flowers from you guys again."

"Okay, sir, I'll have the flowers redelivered and you'll get a refund of 20% of the price. Oh, wait a minute. That bouquet you ordered is no longer available after Mother's Day. I'll have to find an equivalent bouquet." Grumble. "Rather than having you wait while I go through all that, I can let you go now and I'll take care of it."

That last part was at least a step in the right direction. At least she wasn't going to make me wait further while she picked out an equivalent bouquet. I didn't even want the flowers, just a refund, so I figured anything she picked out wouldn't be horrible. And my wife probably didn't want yet-another similar bouquet.

No sooner had I hung up the phone, when I followed a link in the confirmation email to the florist's web site and the "100% Satisfaction Guarantee" page. Right there it said:

Providing exceptional flowers and gifts, and superior customer service is important to all of us at 1-800-horrible-customer-service. We guarantee the freshness of our flowers for 7 days. If there's something we've done and you're not completely satisfied with your order, we'll redeliver, refund, credit or offer a comparable exchange if the original product is not available.

Grrrrrr! Now I'm really pretty angry. I definitely wasn't 100% satisfied, the flowers definitely weren't fresh, and they definitely didn't last 7 days. I had asked for a complete refund but was told that the best I could get was a redelivery and a 20% refund. Frankly, I had been lied to, and that's never a great way to treat a customer.

So I called back.

As you might expect, I got a different customer service agent.

"Hi, I'm Bob," he said. "How can I help you?"

"Bob, I just hung up the phone with someone in your customer service department named Bernadette no more than two minutes ago. I had called because I got a bad bouquet of flowers on Friday that were dead by Monday. Bernadette told me that I could only get a redelivery of my order and a 20% refund of the purchase price. I just went to your web site and it says that if I'm not 100% satisfied that you'll give me a refund. I'd like to cancel the redelivery that Bernadette set up for me and get a full refund."

"You said that somebody else already scheduled a redelivery?" he asked.

"Yes," I replied, "Bernadette said she was going to do that."

"Okay," he said, "I may or may not be able to cancel that. If it has already gone to the florist, it may be impossible to pull it back at this point. When did you say you called before?"

"No more than two minute ago," I said. I then gave Bob all my info again.

"Hmmm... here's a problem," Bob said. "Looks like she still has your record active. I can't make any changes to it until she's done. Can you call back in a bit?"

Huh??? You have got to be kidding. "Okay, Bob, so when are you saying that I should call back?"

"Try again 30 minutes from now."

"So you want me to call back sometime after she's out of the record but before it goes to the florist for shipping?" I asked.

"Yes, that's right."

"Bob, I know that you are fighting computer systems and you're just trying to help me, but let me speak to your supervisor," I said.

"Ummm... hang on a second." (Sounds like typing on the keyboard, probably an IM session to the supervisor.) "Sorry, I can't do that."

"What?!?! I can't talk to a supervisor? Okay, I got a note from Julie Kaufman when I ordered, your Customer Service Director. I want to speak with Julie."

"I'm sorry, but that isn't possible either."

At this point, I'm pretty steamed. I have tried to be reasonable. I'm getting stonewalled. (more typing sounds) Finally, Bob says, "Okay, if I can get a phone number from you, my supervisor says she'll call you back."

I give him my name and phone number, but I have heard this one before so I ask for the name and number of his supervisor. "I can't give out that information," he says.

"So how do I contact her if she fails to contact me?" I ask.

"Oh, I'm pretty sure she'll call you back," he says. That doesn't inspire confidence.

At this point I'm trying hard to keep my cool. All of a sudden he says, "Wait a minute, looks like the other rep saved your record and I can change it for you now. I'll cancel the redeliver and give you a 100% refund."

Breathing slowly and deliberately, I said, "Okay, Bob, thanks. Look, I know that you're just trying to do your job with the tools they give you, but please tell your supervisor that failing to take a call from a dissatisfied customer is extremely horrible customer service behavior. If I was running your organization, I'd force your supervisor back into remedial training and if it ever happened again I'd fire her."

"Uh, okay sir. Sorry about the trouble. I'll tell her." (click) Yea, right. I'm sure you will.

That, my friends is the anatomy of a horrible customer service experience.

Why do I write all this for you? Well, the first reason is that it's cathartic for me. The second reason is that we at Vyatta hate bad customer support. In my next posting, I'll discusses the principles Vyatta uses to deliver a good experience to you and I'll show that had the florist used those principles, I would have had a good experience with them nonetheless. Our subscribers give us rave reviews and I'll share some of their comments.

Market Power Corrupts...

2007-04-06T08:55:00.000-07:00

I have read a number of stories recently about Cisco throwing its weight around. First, there was this gem at CRN describing how channel "partners" are viewing Cisco: 10 Things Partners Are Saying About Cisco. The summary: What partnership? It's a one-way relationship with Cisco as the master and the channel as the slave. While Cisco pits the channel against itself and retaliates when a partner proposes non-Cisco solutions, resulting in single-digit margins, Cisco pulls down 66% gross margin (per the 2006 annual report). What sort of partnership is that?

Hmm... not very inspiring if you're working in the channel.

This morning, I read this in Network World: Cisco looking to counter used-gear competitors. The summary: Cisco definitely wants customers paying top-dollar to buy new gear all the time. If you don't, you risk all sorts of issues even getting your other gear covered with SMARTnet.

In the end, we all know this is just about money... specifically, your money. The article quotes David Willis, chief of research at Gartner:

"You see the writing on the wall," Willis says. "The equipment lasts for five years or more; so how is Cisco going to get revenue? They're going to enforce license restrictions and they're going to keep you on their maintenance, and ultimately start charging you a lot more for software."

Hmmm... also not very inspiring if you're a customer. In fact, Vyatta has had a couple new customers tell us that they chose Vyatta when confronted with Cisco's stance on used equipment.

To paraphrase an old saw, 'Market power corrupts. Absolute market power corrupts absolutely.'"

Ship it...

2007-02-19T21:34:00.000-08:00

Vyatta Community 2 (VC2) has left the building. Download it at the Vyatta web site.

This is a really significant event as it's the first community release based on a true Debian foundation. Previously, Vyatta used Debian package formats to bundle up the bits, but the package dependencies weren't based on true Debian releases. Thus, it was more difficult than it had to be to add software to a Vyatta-based system. What you would want as a user is to simply get ahold of something from Debian and install it. Unfortunately, in 1.0.x versions, this would most likely result in a whole bunch of errors with various dependencies not being met.

VC2 is compatible with Debian Etch. You should simply be able to load packages from that release onto your Vyatta system and it should just work smoothly. This is the first step is unleashing some of the creative energies of the growing Vyatta community. Next steps are to open up and document more fully the APIs that allow modules to be integrated into the CLI and web GUI. We'll have more to saw about that later.

For now, enjoy VC2. Report any problems or get support on the vyatta-users mailing list.

Upcoming Vyatta speaking events

2007-01-04T10:53:00.000-08:00

The new year has come and the Vyatta team is on the move with lots of energy. Vyatta's (newly powerful) CEO, Kelly Herrell, will be speaking next week at the Atlanta Telecom Professionals Open Source Solutions for Telecom event being held on January 9. Other speakers in addition to Kelly include Dan Weber, VP of Information Technology at Angelica Corp, and Kevin P. Fleming, the co-maintainer of Asterisk at Digium. If you're located in or around Atlanta, GA, USA, this would be a great opportunity to learn more about the Vyatta OFR and Asterisk, and meet Kelly live.

Not to diss too much on Atlanta, but I drew the lucky straw. On January 20, I'll be speaking at the Pacific Free and Open Source Software Conference (PFOSSCON 2007) in Honolulu, HI, USA. I was privileged to get an invite for this opportunity from Vyatta-friend Jim Thompson of Netgate. This is going to be a fun event. Other speakers there include the granddaddy of free software, Richard Stallman, and Sun Microsystem's GNU/Linux strategist, Barton George. If you live on the islands (or you want to take a vacation punctuated with an open-source conference), register at the PFOSSCON web site.

Update: Keith Hartley keeps reminding me how to spell "boondoggle." ;-)

Wedged between Cisco and Juniper

2006-12-28T12:16:00.000-08:00

Christmas time is fun. Presents come in so many ways. Among the things that arrived this year, Vyatta got some additional recognition. Network World published its list of the 50 most powerful people in networking. There, in the Network Infrastructure category, wedged in between Charlie Giancarlo, Senior vice president and chief development officer of Cisco, and Scott Kriens, CEO of Juniper, is Vyatta's own Kelly Herrell. That's some nice company to keep, I think. Can anybody say "validation?" I thought you could.

You can also read Kelly's in-depth profile at Network World. Who knew you could go from charter fishing to open-source networking...

Whaddaya know, Cisco says decoupling is the way to go

2006-12-20T06:36:00.000-08:00

Well, well. What do we have here? It seems that earlier this month at Cisco's analyst conference, the networking giant announced that it is going to start separating hardware from it's IOS software: unbundling the two in effect.

Obviously, this is something Vyatta has believed in for a long time. We think that unbundling of networking hardware and software is a natural course for the market to take long term. The fact is, people need to be able to choose hardware and software platforms independently to best suit the needs of their particular situation. With an unbundled system, you get greater flexibility. The question for Cisco is whether you will also get better pricing? My guess is that you won't.

Further, Cisco seems to be waving around the currently über-hot "virtualization" word, saying that IOS will be able to run multiple applications on the same hardware. To quote Inigo Montoya, "I do not think that word means what you think it means." Will Cisco's virtualization solution handle other, 3rd party applications, or will it be Cisco-specific? Does Cisco really mean virtualization with a true hypervisor, or are they just talking about adding processes such that customers can restart BGP without rebooting a whole system? Who knows. What I'm pretty sure about is that customers will have to pay more for the privilege.

In any case, it's always fun when the market follows you. Vyatta has already unbundled hardware from software. And Vyatta already works great with VMware if you want true virtualization.

I think the question you have to ask yourself is where the long-term power lies: with closed-source solutions, even if unbundled, or with open-source solutions where the community can drive things forward at a faster pace? Vyatta obviously believes strongly in the power of an open community. Watching our download weblogs, we think many of you do, too.

Pondering Free

2006-11-28T09:55:00.000-08:00

What would you do if computing resources became free? That's essentially the question that Chris Anderson asks in his Long Tail blog. You see, MIPS are quickly becoming a free resource in the world of computing. Dual-core processors are now relatively common. The future promises CPUs with tens of cores on them in just a few years. Indeed, we may see a Moore's-law-like effect where the number of cores per CPU doubles every two years.

How does this affect Vyatta and open source networking? Well, it suggests that more heavy weight problems can be solved with standard hardware, and for less money than in days gone by. Imagine a standard CPU where five out of ten cores are performing packet forwarding while the other five cores are doing things like VPN encryption, anti-virus scanning, and IDS processing.

Some people will be quick to note that while MIPS have been made increasingly free, memory bandwidth is still a bottleneck. That's true. Caches have been made larger and larger to help compensate for the gap between MIPS and memory bandwidth. Unfortunately, for some problems cache doesn't do you much good. Further, networking is one of those problems. Remember that operating on packets, at least for basic forwarding, is a one-time operation; every packet is new (and therefore not in cache), and then it's gone, never to be seen again.

Fortunately, there are things that are happening to help increase memory bandwidth (DDR2, RDRAM, and faster front-side busses) as well as reduce latency (integrated memory controllers ala AMD Opteron/Athlon). These innovations, coupled with general increases in I/O bandwidth (PCI Express) will help standard hardware do more and more.

Send me your thoughts at "dave at vyatta".

Note to self...

2006-11-06T17:45:00.000-08:00

...remember to read the patent application the attorneys sent over. Speaking of patents. From Good Morning Silicon Valley: Quoted.

Examining the Patent Examiners

2006-10-17T11:07:00.000-07:00

This article appeared in Light Reading a few days ago: Cisco's Triple Threat. It seems Cisco has bought a patent of Sandstream Communications that claims to cover a "System and method for providing integrated voice, video and data to customer premesis over a single network." As near as I can tell, this patent is completely bogus. It's on par with the XOR cursor patent from the 1980's, Amazon's One-Click ecommerce patent from the 1990's, and Huawei's recent "syslog over SSL" patent.

The first claim of the patent from the PTO web site says:

1. A method for providing integrated voice, video, and data content in an integrated service offering to one or more customer premises, comprising: receiving television programming from a programming source; converting the television programming to a common format for communication over a single network infrastructure using a common communication protocol; receiving data from a data network in the common format of the common communication protocol for communication over the single network infrastructure; receiving telephone communications from a telephone network; converting the telephone communications to the common format for communication over the single network infrastructure using the common communication protocol; communicating the converted television programming, data, and converted telephone communications in the common format over the single network infrastructure using the common communication protocol to one or more customer premises to provide the integrated service offering; and assigning customer premises to multicast domains to support conditional access of the customer premises to content that is selected from the group consisting of selected television programming, video-on-demand, pay-per-view video, near-video-on-demand, audio channels, audio-on-demand, and interactive gaming, wherein the conditional access is implemented using interdiction.

In simple language, this appears to cover the transmission of television, telephone, and data communications over a single network to a customer premise.

Now, before I start ranting, let me first say that I'm not beating up Cisco here. I have needled Cisco for other reasons here before, but this isn't one of those times. Cisco didn't file this patent; they bought some intellectual property of a failed company, the contents of the sale of which probably just included this patent as one item. To my knowledge, Cisco hasn't asserted its patent rights against anybody with respect to this patent and may never do so. The Light Reading article discusses the patent, but doesn't report any bad behavior by Cisco with respect to it.

Thus, let's keep the focus on the real bad guys here: the patent office. The patent examiner who granted this patent needs to be shot. Folks, this is a screaming example of a bogus patent.

For the rest of you (the patent examiners should know this already), not every invention is patentable. There are certain tests an invention must survive before the patent office grants the patent. In particular, an invention must be novel and unobvious for a person having "ordinary skill" in the area of the patent.

What does that mean in plain language? Well, novelty means that nobody has either done it before or communicated publicly about it before. In other words, it has to be new. This patent was filed in the year 2000. Was a single network carrying television, telephony, and data new in the year 2000? I think not. I seem to remember everybody working on such a network back in the early 1990s. At the time, we called it "ATM."

Now, is a network carrying television, telephony, and data exactly unobvious to a person having "ordinary skill" in the year 2000? Again, I think not. Let's see... IP data networks have been around for a long, long time. People were talking about doing video on demand in the 1990s, using IP for the transport. VoIP products were shipping in the 1990s. Seems like right there we have all the ideas "...for providing integrated voice, video, and data content in an integrated service offering."

So, I contend this is another case of the patent examiner not doing his job. This patent needs to be thrown out. At a minimum, it needs to be severely narrowed to cut out all the crap and reduce it to something truly novel and nonobvious. There are other non-trivial claims in the patent and I didn't bother going through each one word-by-word to see if there might actually be something novel and nonobvious lurking; a quick skim didn't reveal anything, however.

Given the shakey ground on which this patent rests, I wouldn't expect Cisco to try to enforce it broadly. If they were to actually try to go up against the carriers or even other manufacturers, the results would be disasterous. What does worry me in such situations is selective enforcement, where a large market leader threatens smaller players for whom the cost of a defense is prohibitive. Patents like this one are a threat to innovation because while the market leaders will have cross-license agreements with each other, they may bully startups who can't expend the energy to fight.

Ultimately, the patent office needs to be taken to task for letting patents like this through its screen. As a holder of five patents myself, I'm not completely anti-patent, but I see many abuses in the system and huge opportunities for reform. That's another discussion entirely, but let's start the reform here: throw out this bogus patent.

Networking Myths: Software, ASICs, and Network Processors

2006-10-11T16:03:00.000-07:00

Google managed to dig up a nice Vyatta reference over at Seeking Alpha: The Future of Network Processing Units Doesn't Look Too Rosy. This was an interesting article because it discusses the technological underpinnings of the networking market. What's the best way to get packets from place to place: software-only, network processors, or dedicated ASICs?

All of these approaches have been tried over the past few decades. I have been fortunate to have participated in the design cycles for some of the key products in the industry. I have worked on designs that have used all three approaches. The answer to the question varies at any given point in time because of technology forces at play in the market, and it depends on what you are trying to optimize for.

What has been interesting is watching the reaction to Vyatta in the market place. There are networking users out there that have been so schooled by vendor FUD that they don't believe a given product can do a particular job unless it's implemented with a given technology. With respect to Vyatta, this typically manifests itself in a statement such as, "Everybody knows that software routing can't do the job; Vendor XYZ has ASICs." It's as if some people believe routers must be implemented with ASICs or they somehow won't work.

Now, not to get too theoretical on you here, but let's talk through some of the issues. All network devices (all computers, actually) are simply big state machines. In response to external stimuli (networking packets in the case of networking devices), the machine jumps from state to state and produces output (switched packets, routing updates, etc.). The only difference between software, network processors, and ASICs is how that state machine is implemented and how quickly it runs.

The short rule in the industry is that if it can be implemented in software, it probably should be. If the functionality is at all complex, it is bound to have bugs that need to be fixed, or additional features to be added. Software gives you the ability to change things down the road.

ASICs are interesting for two reasons. First, they are sometimes more cost effective. You can build a machine to do a custom function with fewer logic gates that the millions and millions required to implement a general-purpose CPU. This is offset by higher design costs and lower volumes for specialized silicon, however. Second, dedicated logic can do things in parallel that software might have to implement with a serial design, thus improving performance. Dedicated hardware will be faster, in the abstract, than software running on a general-purpose processor. The question is, how fast is fast enough given all the other tradeoffs (cost, flexibility, etc.)?

Network processors and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) offer an interesting middle ground. Network processors are CPUs tuned for performing networking tasks. While they are sometimes faster for very specific tasks, they achieve that speed by optimizing for a very specific task: network processing. It's very easy to push a network processor outside the sweet spot of its design target by adding new functionality. Once this occurs, the network processor is often slower than a general-purpose processor performing the same task. Network processors often have very low clock speeds, for instance (hundreds of MHz vs. GHz for x86 processors). They often have small instruction code memory or caches that are optimized for very small loops or very structured data sets. Finally, the costs for network processors is often on-par or even more expensive than a general-purpose CPU, since volumes are smaller and the market more specialized.

A good example here might be the old word processor market. When word processing first came on the scene, Wang made dedicated machines that performed the function. They were custom tuned to do word processing and word processing only. They did it well. And then they died when general-purpose PCs became cheap enough to do word processing and spreadsheets and presentation graphics and all the other things that people wanted to do on their desktops besides word processing that Wang's machines were unable to do.

FPGAs offer another interesting middle-ground. FPGAs allow dedicated hardware logic to be implemented in a chip that can be reprogrammed in the field. The reprogramming can be done whenever a bug is found or some additional functionality is desired. While these features are advantageous, there are still limits. Further, FPGAs are relatively expensive compared with ASICs, though they eliminate some of the up-front ASIC design expenses.

What's going to be interesting is watching Vyatta exploit all of these potential hardware avenues. What many of the early "Everybody knows that software routing can't do the job; Vendor XYZ has ASICs," comments miss is that:

Software can do the job for a nice sweet spot in the market. Vyatta has demonstrated great price/performance characteristics in the T1 to 2 Gbps segment with its currently-available appliance. This is not to be taken lightly. While dedicated hardware is still advantageous in the low-end, for low cost, or the high-end, for performance, software routing works very well in the mid-range.
Vyatta is not limited to running on standard x86 hardware. Vyatta can take advantage of standard CPUs, network processors, ASICs, and FPGAs. Which will we pick? Well, that depends on what we're trying to achieve and for which market segment.

If you have thoughts about these issues, we'd love to hear from you. Feel free to drop me a note directly or join our mailing lists. I'm "dave" at Vyatta.

Cisco has a new logo

2006-10-03T17:29:00.000-07:00

Cisco recently changed its logo. The new one (hat tip The Inquirer) looks like it was drawn by a child with a crayon. While the new logo does seem to generate a negative reaction from a majority of people in our office, I'm sure Cisco's corporate marketing folks can take solace in the fact that they paid a LOT of money for it.

Jessica Simpson, RouterGod

2006-08-22T13:28:00.000-07:00

Wow! Vyatta's own Joel Krauska got a chance to interview Jessica Simpson the other day. Who knew she was so up on open-source routers? Frankly, who knew that she was up on anything? Eh, nevermind. Read the interview. Amazing...

"I'd like to thank the academy..."

2006-08-07T12:10:00.000-07:00

Business awards are always interesting. Vyatta was recently named to Light Reading's Top Ten New Startups list. Of course, we were honored. Light Reading also ran a poll about who on the list had the best chances of success. Vyatta did quite well, thank you very much (if you still want to vote, you can do it here).

Anyway, at least we can talk about this one. We had a (rather large) analyst firm who called us a few months ago and told us we had won its "Technology Innovation of the Year" award for 2006 and that we were invited to a banquet in honor of all the recipients. All we had to do was pay them a large sum of money and it was all done. We could send out press releases, quote them, have reprints of their analysis, etc.

I asked how much I received if I didn't pay the extortion fee. The analyst firm said they'd FedEx us the lexan award and we couldn't put out any press releases or come to the fancy dinner. I wasn't feeling hungry, so I settled for the lexan award and no meal. If you're interested, you can drop by the Vyatta office and view our cool lexan award, but you'll have to sign an NDA and promise not to talk about it with anybody.

Imagine winning an Oscar and the academy then charging you to attend the ceremony.

Secret Society Expansion

2006-07-31T14:18:00.000-07:00

With the recent launch of the OFR, the Vyatta Secret Society rolls have swelled. We had a nice little soiree at Fanny and Alexander's last week. The drinks were cold, the food was excellent, and the summer night air on the back patio was fantastic. If you missed it, feel free to join us next time.

Slashdotted again...

2006-07-25T19:17:00.000-07:00

Well, we got Slashdotted again this afternoon. Server is holding up pretty well. That's two Slashdottings in 5 months with no reboots. Not bad.

The comments range from insightful to, well, let's just say interesting. It's always fun being the corporate spokesperson. When people don't agree with you, they call you all sorts of things.

Irony

2006-06-30T12:45:00.000-07:00

Newsforge reported today about Huawei's assertion that it has applied for a patent that may impact the standardization of syslog over SSL,"Patent application jeopardizes IETF syslog standard". Am I the only one who finds Huawei's assertion of intellectual property rights more than just a little bit ironic, particularly given the suit with Cisco that was settled back in 2004?

That said, without knowing the details of Hauwei's patent, I find it hard to believe that running anything over SSL could conceivably be considered novel by the patent office. Given that both syslog and SSL have existed for quite sometime and SSL was made to be able to run various protocols over it, the combination can't be considered novel. If the patent office lets this through, can I take any other existing protocol and combine that with SSL to create a patentable technology? Maybe I can patent Apples iTunes download service running over SSL, for instance. ;-)

In terms of whether this patent application actually does impact syslog over SSL, isn't it nice that open source will allow us to adapt and evolve to other secure logging standards, if and when the larger networking community decides what those are?

Linux, supercomputers, and where we go from here

2006-06-29T16:13:00.000-07:00

I found this article today, courtesy of the folks at Tectonic in South Africa: Linux continues to rule supercomputers. It seems that yet again Linux continues to rule the list of most powerful computers on the planet. Tectonic reports that 73.4% of the top 500 supercomputers use Linux, including the top two fastest machines.

Remember the days when Linux just ran on a single-processor, 32-bit, x86 system? It was big news when Linux finally made the jump to SMP support. These days, Linux runs on everything from your cell phone to the big-iron described in the Tectonic article.

"What does this have to do with open-source networking?" I hear you ask. Well, as I have gone out and talked with the press, I have repeatedly been asked questions such as, "Doesn't networking, and routing in particular, demand proprietary hardware and software in order to run at speed?" The implication of the question is that proprietary products are better since they are somehow more well-tuned than open-source products.

My typical reply is, "Well, no. Certainly there are limits to what can be achieved by a software forwarding plane, but realize that most mid-range proprietary products are using software forwarding planes, too, and you're just paying more for them than you would for more powerful commodity hardware. Further, don't confuse open-source networking with a software-based forwarding plane. Those are two orthogonal ideas. Obviously, not all closed-source products use hardware-based forwarding. Similarly, one can build open-source networking products with hardware-based forwarding for higher performance."

The fact is, open-source networking is where Linux was in 1995: single-processor, 32-bit, x86 only. There is no fundamental technical reason why it must stay that way, however. In the same way that Linux runs from your mobile phone to the fastest two supercomputers in the world, look for open-source networking to be running on everything from your low-end set-top box to your carrier core. Maybe not this month, maybe not next month, but soon...

Damn hot

2006-06-23T11:11:00.000-07:00

Yea, Allan, I grew up in Santa Rosa and I don't have air conditioning in my current house. It's damn hot.

Dining with Dave, Mike, Simon, and Tony

2006-06-23T10:21:00.000-07:00

This last week, the Vyatta management team sat down to dinner with the Vyatta advisory board. We went to a local restaurant and chatted about all manner of stuff. I think I got the best seat in the house. I had Tony Li (Juniper/Procket/Tropos) across the table, Mike Schroepfer (Mozilla) to my left, and Simon Crosby (XenSource) to my right.

Tony was asking all sorts of technical questions about the Vyatta code base and what changes we thought we needed to make over time. He had several good comments about implementing particular features (QoS and others) and what to avoid. In terms of routing and networking code, Tony has seen it all from an implementation perspective.

Mike shared a bunch of fascinating stories about Mozilla's download infrastructure and how to avoid an international incident surrounding the default "skin" of your Firefox World Cup plugin. (The short story here is that Mozilla released a Firefox plugin that keeps World Cup fans up-to-date on all the latest scores. The plugin also allows you to "skin" your browser with your favorite team colors. It also implements a default skin that comes up the first time. Unfortunately, the plugin was developed here in the USA and somebody who shall remain nameless had the default skin be the USA skin. Of course, the USA is nowhere in World Cup and this only resulted in a lot of tweaked global fans outside the USA. Doh! ;-) )

Simon was all about marketing. I got peppered with a list of questions surrounding our model and where we were going. We discussed the upcoming 1.0 milestone and how we help support the community as it moves from trials and testing to actual deployment.

Dave Newman was a bit down the table, but I could hear him discussing DECnet at one point. Ah, those were the days. ;-)

This was a great evening. Everybody was double-checking our work and giving us great suggestions for how to move forward with Vyatta, based on their extensive experiences in the networking and open-source worlds. As I drove home, I couldn't help but think we have a rocking advisory board! These guys are great.

Cisco to Black Hat: "If I give you some money, will you still love me?"

2006-06-21T14:08:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week, I was reading an article at Infoworld titled After lawsuit, Cisco embraces Black Hat. If you'll remember back to last year, Cisco sued both everybody and their brother to stop the release of information regarding an IOS security vulnerability. Security researcher Michael Lynn was confronted with a restraining order stopping him from talking about the issue and Cisco sent a bunch of folks over to Black Hat to cut/tear the pages of Lynn's presentation from the conference proceedings (juicy video).

This year, Cisco is a platinum sponsor of the event. In an understatement of the year, the Infoworld article quotes Cesar Cerrudo, chief executive officer of security research firm Argeniss as saying, "I think they realized that public relations is more efficient than legal battles." Yup.

Not to belabor the point, but we'd be more than happy for the broad security community to help us find potential exploits in the Vyatta code base. You can grab the complete source online, right now. All we ask is for a little notification as a courtesy before any publishing. Other than that, have at it. We're very interested in security issues and we'll work with you rather than bringing legal action against you.

Interchangeable Parts

2006-06-09T10:38:00.000-07:00

The other day, the worst possible scenario happened: toilet repair duty reared its ugly head (so to speak) on the home-front. One of the joys of home ownership is that you get a first-hand lesson in entropy, the fact that all things decay over time. And because you own them, you're responsible for repairing them. In my case, the rubber gasket that separates the tank from the bowl had disintegrated, causing all the water in the tank to continually drain out.

So, off to the hardware store. Like any guy, I tried to look cool. I adopted my "I do this all day, every day, for a living" pose. After about 5 minutes of browsing all the various pieces of toilet-repair gear, a store employee came by and asked me if I needed any help (this was a local store, not a home-improvement super-store where I would have been on my own).

"Are you finding everything you need?" he asked.

"Yea, I think so," I replied. "I have a case of the tank just leaking into the bowl. What do you recommend I try first?"

"Well," he said thoughtfully, pausing briefly before delivering a juicy tidbit of hardware-store wisdom. "Toilets are an art, not a science. Try a new flapper and if that doesn't work, replace the seal between the tank and the bowl. Assuming you have a standard toilet model, this or this should do the trick," he suggested, pointing to a couple flappers and gaskets.

I grabbed the suggested flapper and gasket. My wife had also suggested that I replace an aging seat that she really didn't like with a new one. I asked about that. "What are my options for new seats?"

"Well, fortunately, seats are pretty standard. You basically have a choice between round and oval," he said, pointing to a wall of decorator options. There were wood ones, plastic ones, white ones, green ones, and pink ones. Just about every option you can imagine, all in two standard shapes, round and oval. I chose one and headed home.

After all was said and done, it ended up being the gasket, not the flapper, but I replaced that, too. My wife was pleased with my choice in seats (basic white is always safe). I learned quite a few things about toilets, life, and open source during the whole experience.

First, toilets really are an art, not a science. Between all the mechanics of a toilet, fill levels, etc., a toilet is about as complex as a Boeing 747. It's a wonder modern society isn't overflowing with raw sewage.

Second, go for the flappers that have a rigid plastic piece to them, not the cheapie ones that are just completely rubber. The rigid plastic arms make the flush mechanics work far better and they are worth the extra $4.

Finally, open interfaces and interchangeable parts are wonderful inventions. Fortunately, my problem toilet was a mainline brand and didn't involve any oddball mechanics. I had plenty of spare parts to choose from and I could get what I needed right off the shelf at the local store without having to either hunt all around town or special order anything. Had I been unlucky enough to have the problem with a more specialized model, it would have been a lot more expensive and time consuming to fix.

That last point has a lot to do with the world of open-source. Open-source fosters the creation of standard interfaces, interchangeable parts, and multiple suppliers. And so if you have your open-source router crap out on you (sorry, I couldn't resist) in a few years, you'll have multiple standard options for how to fix it.

Wanted: People with Taste

2006-05-18T11:24:00.000-07:00

Paul Graham wrote a good book a couple years ago, Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age. I wrote a review of it shortly after it came out.

One of my favorite chapters in that book is titled "Taste for Makers." (Hackers and Painters is a compendium of some of Paul's web essays along with some new material. You can read Taste for Makers on his web site.) Paul begins his essay with:

I was talking recently to a friend who teaches at MIT. His field is hot now and every year he is inundated by applications from would-be graduate students. "A lot of them seem smart," he said. "What I can't tell is whether they have any kind of taste."

Paul goes on to say:

Taste. You don't hear that word much now. And yet we still need the underlying concept, whatever we call it. What my friend meant was that he wanted students who were not just good technicians, but who could use their technical knowledge to design beautiful things.

Indeed. Taste is one of those elusive qualities that never shows up on a resume. Sure, everybody lists the jobs they have held, uses action sentences like "grew revenue from $0 to $1B in six months," and ends with a list of university degrees and that ever-important "References available upon request" (would anybody not provide references if they were requested?). What's always missing is some indication of whether that person has any taste.

I'm not even sure I could provide a good definition of taste, but I think Paul has something when he associates it with the ability to design beautiful things. I think I'd relax that definition a bit and say that taste is the ability to recognize beautiful things. You can't design what you can't even recognize and there are actually many people who can do the design of beautiful things that somebody else has specified.

In the world of products, taste is what separates the truly-special from the increasingly-ordinary. Taste is what makes an Apple iPod "better" than the hundreds of other MP3 players on the market, even the ones that arrived on the scene before it. Taste is what makes a Tivo DVR better than the other DVR alternatives. In these and countless other products, taste is what turns nearly-identical physical components into very-distinctive user experiences.

And unfortunately, taste is both in short supply and difficult to find when reading resumes.

I wrote this blog entry because Vyatta thinks that taste is important. It's something to be sought after and valued when it's found. If you think you have it and want to work with people who value it, send us your resume and include a cover letter telling us why you think so.

We need software engineers, testers familiar with network products, and product managers.

Caffeine deprivation

2006-05-17T09:41:00.000-07:00

Startups run on caffeine. A week or so ago, Vyatta almost came unglued. The coffee maker broke. Nobody knows what happened. It was a nice, expensive, Cuisinart model and it simply wouldn't brew anything or heat up when we hit the switch. We can't quite figure out whether it's the switch that has the problem or the heating element. We called Cuisinart tech support to see if we could get a replacement shipped out (overnight, of course). The Cuisinart representative said we had to have an original receipt. Naturally, Robert had expensed it to the company when he bought it, and the receipt is in the bowels of an accountant's filing cabinet somewhere.

Dave (Newman), John, and Mike (Larson), shown in the picture, seemed to deal okay, even if they were a bit edgy. Tom, just about came unglued. Remember that guy, Shane, who was a contestant on the last season of Survivor (the season that ended last week), the one who smoked three packs of cigarettes a day right up until he left for Panama and then went through level-10 nicotine withdrawal in front of millions of viewers? Well, Shane was a bit more composed at the height of his withdrawal than Tom was when he found out the coffee maker didn't work.

John made an emergency Starbuck's run for everybody. That staved off the immediate effects. Tom went on a mid-morning search for a replacement coffeemaker at the local Target. We now have this Mr. Coffee thermal carafe thing that only brews 8 cups at a time. It makes pretty good coffee, but the volume just isn't there. It's a stop-gap, I'm sure.

Note to other entrepreneurs: it's probably wise for all startups to keep a spare coffee maker in the supply cabinet just for emergencies like this. The loss of productivity from a failure could be as great or greater than losing the email system, broadband connectivity, or source code repository. You have been warned.

All I remember...

2006-05-04T12:34:00.000-07:00

...is that it was 4:00 AM and we were still at Studio 54.

Okay, I'll call that a party.

We started off the night at 9:00 PM at the Foundation Room at the top of the Mandalay. The view, shown below, was awesome.

Unfortunately, I had to miss the Joe Satriani concert at the House of Blues earlier in the evening. Serious bummer. Satriani rocks!

We took over the swanky Buddha and Ganesh rooms at the club and filled the joint with Secret Society members. When we started planning, we figured we might have 50 people show up. By the end of the night, the Foundation Room had given out more than 150 wrist bands and people told us that a bunch of people had been turned away because of the dress code (no sneakers!).

For schwag, we did hats. This ended up being a bit of a problem. Note to self: don't give out hats at a swanky club where the dress code prohibits hats.

One of the funniest moments of the night occurred as Tom Grennan, our VP of engineering, and I were going into the club. We were both carrying 50 hats each from my hotel room up to the club. I was wearing one. We walked up to the bouncer behind the velvet rope at the bottom of the private Foundation Room elevator.

Dave: "We're here for the Vyatta party at the Foundation Room."

Bouncer: "Okay, great. Let me get you guys wristbands. Oh, but you'll need to take off the hat. We have a dress code."

I look at Tom. Tom looks at me. I take off the hat I'm wearing and place it on top of the huge mass of hats that I'm carrying in my arms. The bouncer then lets us through the velvet rope and we go into the elevator. Tom and I start busting up, thinking that there are about to be 100 people up in the club all wearing hats.

After the party ended at the Foundation Room, we checked out Mix in the Mandalay. It wasn't exactly hopping, so Robert suggested we try Studio 54 at the MGM. We piled into a limo and off we went.

Studio 54 is, ahem, interesting. Different crowd. Check out the pictures.

I posted a few of them (the least incriminating ones) at Flickr:

Thanks to everybody who attended this year's Secret Society event. We made a lot of new friends and were able to connect with a bunch of old ones. Here's to next year's party!

The cost of change...

2006-05-01T15:43:00.000-07:00

Ouch! I was just reading the article "Cisco phases out 1700, 2600 and 3700 series routers" by Phil Hochmuth at Network World. It seems Cisco recently announced that it has marked the 1700, 2600, and 3700 series routers for end-of-life. Can you say "costly upgrade?" I thought you could.

I'm often asked by press, analysts, potential customers, etc., about the cost difference between a Vyatta OFR and a closed-source soluition. People seem to understand that open source provides an up-front cost savings in terms of using commodity hardware rather than proprietary hardware, but people frequently miss the costs associated with ongoing change.

If you're an organization that just bought a Cisco 3700 series router last year, you will probably be upset today. I would be. See, after March 2007, you won't be able to buy a Cisco 3700. If you want to do something like upgrade the system after March 2007, you'll be forced to scavenge your parts from the used market (eBay, et. al.). And we know that Cisco looks down on anything purchased from the used market. In March 2012, you won't be able to get Cisco to support you at all. That sounds like a long time from now, but last week Cisco just relegated your $8,000 to $12,000 box (base price, more with options and interfaces) to a status just above that of a paperweight. Read the article for some descriptions of the organizations that are having to buy all-new replacement 3800 routers today. Also note that a 3800 is more expensive ($9,500 minimum). If you have a large deployment, Cisco just forced you into a large purchase.

Note that if you had purchased an open source product you probably would have saved more than half right off the cost of the initial purchase, and even if your particular hardware model had gone obsolete in a couple years, you'd still be able to buy all sorts of things to plug into it for quite some time. Things like individual x86 processor models and even PCI busses may go by the wayside, but the Vyatta OFR will continue to support those things for a very long time indeed (as long as the Linux kernel does) and you have the whole ecosystem of commodity hardware vendors from whom to purchase additional products in the mean time. Thus, if a PCI Ethernet card fails 7 years from now, you'll probably still be able to buy a replacement from somewhere.

Note that Cisco isn't the only bad-guy here. All the closed networking companies obsolete hardware from time to time. The Network World article is just a timely example. As a product manager working for some of those companies, I'm very familiar with the EOL drill and with the costs to the company of supporting old hardware models. The benefit of an open platform to users is that a whole ecosystem exists to support all the various pieces of gear. Even if a single vendor stops shipping something, you can much more easily transition to something from another supplier. You aren't held hostage.

So, what's the price difference between a closed solution versus an open one? For many organizations right now, it's at least $9,500 times the number of new 3800 routers they need to buy.

I only got half of it

2006-04-12T13:48:00.000-07:00

I only got half of it. I still like strawberry better. And you should definitely do the peanut butter before jelly. Allan, what kind of weirdo are you? Sheesh.

More on snackfood schwag

2006-04-11T16:53:00.000-07:00

Robert directed me to the fact that you can order customized M&M's on the main M&M website. Unfortunately, it looks like you can only order text customization (no logos) and they only accept consumer orders, nothing commercial (don't ask me how they police this). If anybody knows of how I can get M&M's customized on a commercial scale, let me know. I have found ways to get custom branded packaging, but nothing where I can actually get a Vyatta logo onto the candies.

Cheeze Doodles, the official snackfood of Vyatta

2006-04-05T16:11:00.000-07:00

Allan has been doing all the high-concept blogging lately:

How we're different.
How we might end up as the next Google (chuckle...)
How we're not like vanilla ice-cream (okay, this one wasn't exactly high-concept, but there was a message in there somewhere, I know it).

Me? I'm just trying to get done all the mundane stuff. My afternoon has been spent browsing through schwag catalogs, trying to figure out something nice we can do for the Secret Society party at Interop in May. I think I want a hat of some sort. If people have ideas/preferences, let me know at dave at vyatta.

My basic criteria for schwag is that it be nice stuff, stuff that you'll actually want to use more than once, if not actually cherish. I have been in this business for so long and see so many gimmicky products that people end up dumping into the trash before they even reach the exit door, let alone in their hotel rooms before catching the flight back home. Heck, when I'm walking through a trade-show, I actually refuse to take most schwag that the booth babes try to stuff in my bag simply because it's crap. I wonder how many cubic yards of schwag-crap (to coin a new word) the tradeshow industry hauls from China to our landfills every year? (This seems like one of those factiod stats that some analyst, somewhere, probably keeps track of.)

Anyway, I'm pondering all this and how I can scoop Allan with a high-concept blog post when he walks into the kitchen and returns with Cheeze Doodles. This is what I call them. This week's brand is Cheetos, but we're non-discriminatory and sometimes John buys the low(er)-fat kind from Trader Joes (that really makes me feel like I'm doing something good for my health). In all cases they must be the crunchy kind; the puffed ones are just so... unsubstantial.

I shouted, "Damn you!" and headed to the kitchen for some of my own.

The other day, Allan and I decided that Cheeze Doodles (in all their various branded incarnations) are the official snack food of Vyatta. There's something about the artificial, neon, convicts-on-trash-duty orange color about them that goes with the Vyatta logo. That and they're loaded with fat and basically have no redeeming qualities whatsoever. In short, the perfect startup food. We're thinking about approaching Frito-Lay for a marketing sponsorship, sort of like what they do for the Olympics every four years (or is it two now?).

Allan asked whether we can get small bags of Cheeze Doodles printed with our logo and use those as schwag? Now, that's something Google-esque. Robert countered that we should get dark-colored M&Ms printed with our logo. That would be pretty cool, actually. He says he's seen it done before. I have to look into that. In any case, edible schwag is on our minds today. At least it has a better chance of not ending up in the land fill. And even if it does, the M&Ms should be biodegradable; the Cheeze Doodles probably have a half-life of a few dozen years.

[Side note: this is going to be a really nice Secret Society meeting in Vegas. We have a line-up on a venue and it should be swanky and fun. If you're at all going to be at Interop, make sure you're there on Tuesday night, May 2, for the event.]

Secret Society Success

2006-03-30T09:45:00.000-08:00

The recent Secret Society party was a huge success! Allan already posted a bit on it. We had a bunch of folks interested in how open source is going to impact the network infrastructure market. That included users, engineers and technologists, business people, finance people, analysts, press, and just about everything in between. Basically, it was a great cross section of the world. The conversation ranged from features and functionality of XORP and the OFR, to open source business models, to what's Allan's kick with vanilla ice cream (I'm a strawberry guy, myself), and why I hate fax machines. All-in-all, it was great fun.

I think the best part for me was when Simon Crosby, Founder and CTO of XenSource, told me that he loved our web site. After scrambling to get it up and finished just as the Business 2.0 article was hitting newsstands, it felt nice to have the work recognized. I wanted something simple, non-corporate, and straight-to-the-point. Simon said we achieved that. Thanks, Simon! Props to Katie Bush, our graphic designer, and Matt Tucker, our web programmer; you guys made it a reality.

Hopefully, many people are now sipping coffee from their brand-spankin' new Vyatta logo coffee mugs, making their colleagues green with envy.

If you were wondering who was there and what we all looked like, I posted all the photos to Flickr. You can see some folks clutching their mugs. Enjoy!

If you missed this Secret Society meeting, please try to come in Vegas. We think the event will be the evening of May 2, but we'll get back to you with more info as we lock things down. We're growing, getting bigger every day. Hopefully, Interop in Las Vegas will afford some international people the opportunity to take part face-to-face.

Bouncing emails and spam blacklists

2006-03-24T15:08:00.000-08:00

Earlier this afternoon, I sent out invites to the next Secret Society party taking place on Tuesday. (You're welcome to come. Drop on by.) A couple things struck me during the course of this exercise.

My first question was, why do people give us bogus names and email addresses? The registration form specifically states that registration is optional and has a big button labeled "skip it." We're trying to be as courteous as we can here. Please do the same and either give us real data so we can keep in touch, or skip right on through if that bothers you. We only want to communicate with people who want to hear from us.

The next issue was handling all the bounces. Quite a few of the bounces were because of various mail servers using spam blacklists. It turns out that the particular address block in which our mail server resides was once home to a big spam company. Grumble. Of course the spamming company is long gone, but we're still suffering. We'll work with our ISP to get things moved around and try to get off the various blacklists, but it's really painful. In the era of great Bayesian filtering, it amazes me to no end that people still use blacklists as a binary spam test. I mean, sure it should be an input to the Bayesian filter, but it's just one input. This isn't the first time I have had this problem happen to me. Previous companies encountered the same thing.

Such is life in a new small company...

Industrial fax support

2006-03-24T15:00:00.000-08:00

I have already expressed my general disgust for fax machines. We finally got our fax line up and working.

The other day, one of our VCs moved their offices and told us that we could have some old office equipment. Among the scores were some heavy-duty HP printers and a large fax machine. Now we can fax with the best of them. The possibilities are endless...

Pictures from ICSI Bears

2006-03-15T11:06:00.000-08:00

A couple weeks ago, Allan mentioned presenting at the ICSI Bears conference. The International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) is the home for the XORP project. The Bears conference is ICSI's way of showcasing some of its research areas and demonstrate how they are being used by industry. I finally got around to uploading some pictures.

Allan presenting the Vyatta story:

Pavlin Radoslavov (left) and Atanu Ghosh (right) are two of the XORP contributors. You'll see them posting to the XORP mailing lists quite regularly:

A few loyal Bay Area Secret Society members showed up to support Allan. From left to right: Mark Culpepper, John Shaver, Peter Wohlers, and Mark Weingarten:

Vern Paxon (left) and I, Dave Roberts (right), talking about some of Vern's work on intrusion detection and prevention. Vern is a former chair of the IRTF, the research side of the IETF, and the author of the popular Flex lexical analyzer construction tool: