Contributors

NetworkHeresy has a number of contributors throughout the networking industry and academia.  Posts tend to be collaborations by multiple authors and focused on network system design, and macro industry trends.  If you’re interested in writing a blog with us, please contact Martìn or Bruce.

Alex Bachmutsky is a Distinguished Engineer at Ericsson. Alex has 30 years experience in software, hardware and system architecture in areas of networking, mobile and wireless, security, multi-core processors, packet processing technologies, high availability and multimedia. He has given dozens of presentations, has tens of patents, and has authored multiple publications, including his book “System Design for Telecommunication Gateways”.

Martìn Casado is the Chief Architect of Networking at VMware and was the Co-Founder and CTO of Nicira Networks.  Martìn received his PhD from Stanford University where we remains a Consulting Assistant Professor.  He received the Grace Murry Hopper Award for “his work creating the movement of Software Defined Networking (SDN), a new paradigm in the research and practice of computer networking that provides a software alternative to hardware-based network components.”

Bruce Davie is a Principal Engineer at VMware in the Networking and Security BU. He joined VMware as part of the Nicira acquisition, and focuses on network virtualization. He has over 20 years of networking industry experience, and was a Cisco Fellow prior to joining Nicira. At Cisco, he worked closely with leading service providers to enhance the capabilities of their networks. He led the team that developed multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) and contributed to the standards on IP quality of service. He has written over a dozen Internet RFCs and several networking textbooks. He currently chairs the ACM’s Special Interest Group on Data Communications (SIGCOMM) and is an ACM Fellow.

Jesse Gross is bothered by systems that he doesn’t understand from top to bottom, so he generally works at lower layers so there is less to think about. At Nicira/VMware, he has focused on creating flexible and high performance data plane building blocks for software-based networking. To this end, he is the maintainer of Open vSwitch in the Linux kernel, designed the Stateless Transport Tunneling (STT) protocol, and worked on mechanisms for blending software flexibility with hardware performance.

Teemu Koponen was the chief architect at Nicira Networks before joining VMware. Teemu received his PhD from Helsinki University of Technology in 2008 and ever since has been indecisive enough to remain active within the network research community while working for the industry. He received the ACM SIGCOMM Rising Star Award 2012 for his contributions on network architectures.

Andrew Lambeth is a Principal Engineer at VMware. He has been virtualizing networking for long enough to have coined the term “vswitch”, and led the vDS distributed switching project at VMware before joining Nicira to work on controller distribution in the NVP team. Andrew is excited to be back at VMware now to help realize the vision of truly virtualizing the entire datacenter.

Ben Pfaff is the lead developer of the Open vSwitch project.  He was a co-creator of OpenFlow and led the development effort of the original OpenFlow reference implementation.   He was a founding employee at Nicira and is currently at VMware. He received his PhD from Stanford University in 2007. Ben has worked in free and open source software projects, including Debian and GNU, for over 20 years.

JR Rivers is the co-founder and CEO of Cumulus Networks where he is responsible for the overall strategic direction of the company. JR has been involved with networking since Ethernet only ran on coaxial cables.  He’s worked on some of the most foundational networking products of their time, from early Network Interface Cards at 3Com through switching and routing products at Cisco. JR’s early involvement in home-grown networking at Google and as the VP of System Architecture for Cisco’s Unified Computing System helped fine tune his perspective on networking for the modern datacenter.