Jagadeesh Surfaces

Our old friend B.V. Jagadeesh emerged as CEO of 3Leaf, a server virtualization company.  3Leaf, like Xsigo -- a similar company that came out of stealth this week -- develops intelligent I/O fabrics built today on Infiniband interconnect (although all claim to be interconnect agnostic and will go with what makes most sense over time). These fabrics simplify and optimize I/O in virtualized data centers by helping consolidate the dense LAN and SAN server connections onto Infiniband as well as by adding significantly to the management of these subsystems under virtualization. Interestingly, at the same time Cisco is moving away from this direction having taken the Infiniband-based TopSpin system and moved it back to a control appliance that is no longer in the data path. If all that weren't complicated enough, Ed Bugnion -- Vmware founder and CTO -- is now CTO at Nuova, a Cisco-funded startup. Nuova is working to make Ethernet safe for SAN (which requires some changes to the Ethernet standards). With these changes Cisco will use Ethernet for the consolidated virtualization fabric.  3Leaf's founding CEO and now CTO -- Bob Quinn -- had what might be the clarifying perspective as to these different approaches. Quinn argued that virtualization isn't going to quickly break down the functional stovepipes in the data center, and you can't build products that are for the storage guys, the network guys and the server guys. 3Leaf is very explicit about building products for the server guys and making its use transparent to the network and storage teams. Cisco is obviously going to build for the network team. Cisco can evolve Ethernet but startups can't.  Having turned NetScaler around and arranged the marriage with Citrix we were wondering what BV would do next. Now we know and we're excited to watch it unfold.