John Chambers and a star team of ex-Cisco engineers launched Pensando Systems | Hacker News Reader

John Chambers and a star team of ex-Cisco engineers launched Pensando Systems

businessinsider.com

35 pointsjagandecapri20 comments

"Years ago, AWS developed something similar in Nitro, a system of dedicated integrated circuits and specialized software that offloads some of the heavy lifting from host machines provisioned through Amazon's next-generation C- and M-series of EC2 instances."

"Whereas Nitro is exclusive to AWS, Pensando will be available to the wider market, allowing enterprises to create "their own customized version of the cloud systems," Chambers said."

Gives me flashbacks to the days 20 years ago when a 32-bit/33MHz PCI interface crypto accelerator card, with dedicated ASIC, was a good way to speed up SSL page serving on your openbsd machines.

Hifn, Inc of Los Gatos, CA was one such company.

From the docs .. AWS Nitro is 1] a family of cards that offloads and accelerates IO for functions (for VPC, EBS, Instance Storage, Security) 2] a lightweight hypervisor that presumably works well with these cards, and 3] the nitro "security chip" specifics of which are sparse.

Actually amazing part of this is MPLS phenomenon...

Mario Mazzola, Prem Jain, Luca Cafiero, and Soni Jiandani (long known collectively at and around Cisco as MPLS) have played key roles in Cisco’s “spin in” strategy under former CEO John Chambers.

while John Chambers was the CEO he I think bought four (!) companies that these folks had created.

https://www.businessinsider.in/enterprise/mobile/why-cisco-h...

They beat most of 'serial entrepreneurs' hands down.

at the expense of killing innovation company wide.

Pensando?? Is that the best domain name left?

Took a lot of thinking

It’s an Italian word. A couple of Chambers’ deputies in MPLS are Italians.

Pensando == Spanish word that translates to: thinking

https://www.google.com/search?q=translate%3A+pensando

Thanks - goes to show how anglo centric I am.

More than a few ex-Cisco staff would pour fuel on any fire under chambers' pyre. I never quite got why. Clearly he has loyalty and antipathy but in different proportion?

No one runs a big pseudocongolomerate like Cisco for 20 years without making friends and enemies.

> Pensando believes its tech will take on the mighty Amazon Web Services, the leading cloud computing platform.

Ballsy. I wonder what services they will kick off with. I especially wonder what their Lambda service will be like.

Sounds like they are selling a server NIC optimized for high-throughput VM/Container traffic.

"Speed up edge services" -- not very descriptive.

I can imagine small services in hundreds of zones colocated near the clients, rather than clustered in a couple dozen regions. But whatever their story is, they will need to tell it better.

I still dont know what they do. Sounds like a CPU...

FPGA based accelerators is my guess.

An overview of AWS Nitro, which they are trying to copy, is helpful:

https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2019/02/aws-nitro-system/

Basically PCI cards to put into commodity servers. That do various types of hardware offload for routing, switching, storage, security, etc. Probably with out of the box hypervisors and management for those functions.

I imagine they want to sell direct to cloud providers like Digital Ocean and IBM. And perhaps through Dell, VMWare, etc, for Enterprise customers that want high end private clouds.

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