
John Chambers and a star team of ex-Cisco engineers launched Pensando Systems - jagandecapri
https://www.businessinsider.com/john-chambers-pensando-systems-cisco-stars-amazon-2019-10
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raincom
"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."

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walrus01
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.

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

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achow
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...](https://www.businessinsider.in/enterprise/mobile/why-cisco-has-
showered-these-three-men-with-billions-of-dollars/articleshow/43088562.cms)

They beat most of 'serial entrepreneurs' hands down.

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vvram
at the expense of killing innovation company wide.

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DrScientist
Pensando?? Is that the best domain name left?

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

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sergius
Pensando == Spanish word that translates to: thinking

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

~~~
DrScientist
Thanks - goes to show how anglo centric I am.

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ggm
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?

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

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tus88
> 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.

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

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

~~~
erik_seaberg
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.

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

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

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

