Last week Ben Pfaff was among the folks from VMware HQ in Palo Alto visiting our Pune R&D office. Ben is a Principal Engineer in Networking & Security Business Unit, involved in development of the same product line which I work on at VMware. Ben came on board when VMware acquired the SDN startup Nicira Networks backin 2012. In case you didn't know the founders of Nicira such as Martin Casado are the inventors of SDN which is transforming the networking industry since last couple of years. Ben has been a lead developer of OVS project and recently Ben's paper on Open vSwitch won the Best Paper award at NSDI. He was kind enough to speak to the tech community in Pune on the topics of Open vSwitch and Open Virtual Network. It's kind of interesting how the idea of this talk came to life...
Off late I have started following twitter handles of the key players including Ben, involved in VMWare NSX and the Network Virtualization industry in general. So when I saw Ben's tweet on OvsCon 2015 about the OVS goodies he has, I asked him if he can send them over to Pune so that I could use them in evangelizing the project locally in the industry as well as academia. Within a few minutes came Ben's reply that he is scheduled to fly to Pune next week and will handover the goodies to me that time. It was pleasant surprise to me given that it was something like 2:00 AM in PA at that time. Ben showed a keen interact to interact with the students in Pune academic circles which I am associated with i.e. engineering colleges such as PICT, COEP, SIT, etc. where I either teach as a guest lecturer, guide under-grad systems projects or provide assistance to their campus hiring initiatives. Since the colleges are having winter vacations at the time, I gave Ben the option of doing a talk for the OpenStack community in Pune and I volunteered to organize the same! With that began the preparation to host the talk at Vmware in a week's time...
The channels used to contact the prospective interested folks included popular social media channels such as focused LinkedIn groups, Google plus announcements, facebook posts, tweets, google forms etc. The other way used to reach out to the audiences was through the VMware employees who had connections in the companies working in the domain of networking & virtulazation such as Red Hat, Cisco Systems, Calsoft, Intel, etc. Unfortunately the option of announcing OpenStack meetup did not work out in time, so we weren't sure how many folks would actually turn up for the talk on such a short notice, even though it was a free talk at a central location in Pune. With one day left for the talk, I had only about 25 confirmations in hand and so was wondering if we would have the hall full or empty or half full & half empty ;-)
Fortunately whatever little campaigning and praying we did in the whatever small amount of time we had paid off, and around 50 folks reached the venue to fill up the hall to its capacity! Ben's talk was great as usual and I noticed that he made significant changes to the slides he presented to the internal VMware audience to make it more suitable for the open source project community. Also this talk was more focused on OVN rather than OVS which he had covered in his presentation to VMware R&D team. Overall the talk was well received and there was a lot of post-talk interaction and networking before everyone left the venue. Here are a couple of picture of the event thanks to our in-house director of innovation, Girish Mujumdar...
If you missed this talk but wanted to learn more about OVN, then check out the video of a similar talk given by the OVN team at the last OpenStack summit in Vancouver in May 2015...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEzXTq2fPDg
Happy holidays and a wishing you a happy new year in advance!!!
Off late I have started following twitter handles of the key players including Ben, involved in VMWare NSX and the Network Virtualization industry in general. So when I saw Ben's tweet on OvsCon 2015 about the OVS goodies he has, I asked him if he can send them over to Pune so that I could use them in evangelizing the project locally in the industry as well as academia. Within a few minutes came Ben's reply that he is scheduled to fly to Pune next week and will handover the goodies to me that time. It was pleasant surprise to me given that it was something like 2:00 AM in PA at that time. Ben showed a keen interact to interact with the students in Pune academic circles which I am associated with i.e. engineering colleges such as PICT, COEP, SIT, etc. where I either teach as a guest lecturer, guide under-grad systems projects or provide assistance to their campus hiring initiatives. Since the colleges are having winter vacations at the time, I gave Ben the option of doing a talk for the OpenStack community in Pune and I volunteered to organize the same! With that began the preparation to host the talk at Vmware in a week's time...
The channels used to contact the prospective interested folks included popular social media channels such as focused LinkedIn groups, Google plus announcements, facebook posts, tweets, google forms etc. The other way used to reach out to the audiences was through the VMware employees who had connections in the companies working in the domain of networking & virtulazation such as Red Hat, Cisco Systems, Calsoft, Intel, etc. Unfortunately the option of announcing OpenStack meetup did not work out in time, so we weren't sure how many folks would actually turn up for the talk on such a short notice, even though it was a free talk at a central location in Pune. With one day left for the talk, I had only about 25 confirmations in hand and so was wondering if we would have the hall full or empty or half full & half empty ;-)
Fortunately whatever little campaigning and praying we did in the whatever small amount of time we had paid off, and around 50 folks reached the venue to fill up the hall to its capacity! Ben's talk was great as usual and I noticed that he made significant changes to the slides he presented to the internal VMware audience to make it more suitable for the open source project community. Also this talk was more focused on OVN rather than OVS which he had covered in his presentation to VMware R&D team. Overall the talk was well received and there was a lot of post-talk interaction and networking before everyone left the venue. Here are a couple of picture of the event thanks to our in-house director of innovation, Girish Mujumdar...
If you missed this talk but wanted to learn more about OVN, then check out the video of a similar talk given by the OVN team at the last OpenStack summit in Vancouver in May 2015...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEzXTq2fPDg
Happy holidays and a wishing you a happy new year in advance!!!
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