From Kalamazoo to Silicon Valley and Beyond (K2SV+)

     T ech was moving fast in 2008. While Apple was rolling out its first iPhones, I was already on the trail of a related next big thing — cloud computing. A handful of young companies were building very big data centers. Some aimed to sell spare time on them; others used them to offer free services. Amazon had started renting its servers in 2002. It would take years before the service was easy to use, popular and profitable enough to attract rivals. Google was still thought of mainly as the company that won the Internet search wars, beating out rivals like AltaVista and Yahoo. Before most of us knew what was going on, it launched a menu of free consumer services -- email in 2004, digital maps in 2005 and video through its acquisition of startup YouTube in 2006.  Initially, the free services didn’t seem all that interesting. We knew they were a way of amassing data, and we knew data was the new oil, the fuel of cloud computing. With enough data, the big ...

                         Facebook's Amir Michael with a  rack server design in 2012       A s an EE Times reporter back in the 2000’s, I was a hardware guy, so I mainly followed the cloud computing hardware not the algorithms. I was trying to figure out what this sea change in our digital lives would mean for my engineering readers. What sort of systems would people build? What kind of chips would they need? At first, the outlook seemed gloomy. Google was rumored to have designed its own PC server motherboards to run its services. Its data centers were so large -- so the story went – that cutting five cents on the cost and a few watts on the power of each board would amount to millions maybe tens of millions of dollars in savings. But no one knew for sure because the Googles and Amazons kept quiet. They didn’t want anyone else to learn the hard lessons of cloud computing they were figuring out...

     W hile I chronicle d havoc the cloud was wreaking with my readers in computer companies, John D’Ambrosia found himself in the path of the same storm. D’Ambrosia ran groups that wrote th e standards for Ethernet, the leading technology for sending data around on office networks. Herding the cats of tech experts that define such industry standards is a volunteer gig for engineers that maintain a paying job at a company, typically one that has a strategic stake in the standards. In 2009, D’Ambrosia (left) worked for a large company that made connectors, the necessary but low-tech parts that link computers and networks. He sported a thick, close-cropped head of blond hair that ringed a boyish face, and he had a boy’s love for his golden retriever who perpetually slept at his feet, waiting under his desk for the endless telephone conference calls to end. D’Ambrosia was well suited to the role of standards chairman: he was a people person who fed on the energy of ...

      B y the time D’Ambrosia was convening his 400G effort, Google went public with details of the next traffic jam inside its big data centers — complexity. Networking more than a million servers into one warehouse-sized computer required thousands of routers and switches and those systems demanded far too much time from human operators. A group of academics and entrepreneurs gathered at Stanford to find a way forward. One of them, Amin Vahdat, a computer science professor Google hired to sort out its networking issues, became a spokesperson. As the representative of one of the world’s largest buyers of networking gear, Vahdat had clout. He was also a good communicator, explaining complex and often controversial new ideas in a calm, clear way. That came in handy because the cloud giants were essentially upending the technology and business model of big switch and router makers like Cisco. Vahdat is ultra smart, soft spoken and lucky. While still an undergrad ...