Big Brainy Data Pipe

Information technology companies can raise special issues for internal IT staff, as the support services come close to the core of the business, says Sanjeev Jorapur, NetXen’s vice president for technology.

For example, the Santa Clara, Calif., company’s three full-time and one part-time IT staff members not only support the basic needs of the 120 employees, but they have to keep nearly 300 servers in the engineering lab running. And that’s counting only the physical boxes, without adding virtual servers to the tally.

“This is an engineering and development lab, and we make technology that goes in servers,” Jorapur says. “Our view is that IT is a service organization within the business, and it has to conform to the nature and culture of the business. The best way for IT to operate and grow in importance is to hear what the organization wants. When it does that well, it lubricates the entire process.”

The engineers on NetXen’s development and test teams largely work on technology from the company’s original equipment manufacturer partners, which include Hewlett-Packard and IBM, so IT is responsible for maintaining multiple platforms, as well as applications for virtual server implementations from VMware and XenSource (which is being acquired by Citrix).

“Part of what we do is testing on a whole gamut of servers, from 1U or 2U to 4U boxes or blade servers, and they all have to be in good order,” Jorapur says.

As would be the case in any enterprise, the IT staff also must keep the company’s business software running, and the lines of communication open on e-mail, Windows Messenger and Skype. NetXen engineers have also started to use a wiki to record the progress of their work and receive feedback from colleagues. A virtual private network tunnel provides a secure connection for NetXen’s satellite office in Pune, India, as well as for employees who work remotely.

“It’s very important to us that when you work remotely, it’s like you are in the same office as everyone else in the company,” says Jorapur. “All our applications have to work the same no matter where we are.”

IT can take a useful leadership role in evaluating technologies to meet the needs expressed by the organization, he says, adding that the staff is weighing the benefits of collaboration tools, for instance.

NetXen looks for IT staffers with multiple skills to match the broad range of responsibilities they’ll cover — a crucial hiring philosophy for any small company, according to Jorapur.

“We’re not much different in some ways than any other small company, even though we have different technical needs,” he says. “People have to wear many hats. Flexibility in skills and work habits are important, along with the willingness to put in time and effort. Those things make [people] really valuable to the company.”

Founder Govind Kizhepat says NetXen tries to “practice what we preach” when it comes to IT.

“Of course we use our own products and test our own stuff, but we also believe that IT should have the agility we’re trying to bring to the data center,” he says.

Late 1960s: Before Ethernet, Norman Abramson leads researchers at the University of Hawaii in creating ALOHAnet. The digital radio network, which established a simple transmission and response protocol for the signals, transmits packets of information between the islands. Interference between signals, or collisions, keeps successful transmission rates below 20 percent.

1972: Robert Metcalfe of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in Palo Alto, Calif., develops a new system based on algorithms that can predict when collisions will occur and create backoffs — slower transmission speeds — to avoid them. Metcalfe and his colleagues build an experimental version of the new system called Aloha Alto Network that supports a data transmission rate of 2.94 megabits per second between Xerox Alto personal workstations and laser printers. Successful transmission rates climb above 90 percent.

1973: The Xerox PARC team renames its system Ethernet to suggest that the protocol will work on computers other than Altos and that the technology is a leap beyond ALOHAnet.

1976: Metcalfe and David Boggs publish the groundbreaking paper, “Ethernet: Distributed Packet-Switching for LANs.”

1977: Metcalfe receives U.S. Patent 4,063,220 for his “multipoint data communication system with collision detection.”

1979: Digital Equipment, Intel and Xerox join in what is dubbed the DIX cartel to produce Ethernet products.

1983: The Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers ratifies Ethernet as standard 802.3.

Early ’80s: Novell, through NetWare, pushes broad acceptance of Ethernet.

Early ’90s: Ethernet becomes the de facto local area network standard, replacing rival protocols such as Token Ring and ARCnet. By the end of the decade, an estimated 80 percent to 90 percent of all LAN implementations rely on Ethernet.

1995: IEEE awards Abramson its Koji Kobayashi Award for “the development of the concept of Aloha systems, which led to modern LANs.”

1995: IEEE ratifies fast-Ethernet standard 802.3u, providing for transmission rates of 100Mbps.

1998: IEEE approves 802.3z, the Gigabit Ethernet standard.

2005: IEEE 802.3-2005 specifies 10 Gig-E.

Future: 40 and 100 Gig-E are in development.

Sources: www.trendcomms.com, and Ethernet: The Definitive Guide, by Charles E. Spurgeon