Ipsilon Networks

» see ipsilon.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Tom Lyon was employee number eight at Sun Microsystems and spent twelve years there in the networking group. He left in 1994 and started Ipsilon Networks in Palo Alto that October with an idea that was briefly the most argued-about proposition in the industry. ATM switches had fast, cheap hardware and IP had all the traffic. So take an ATM switch, throw away every line of its ATM control software, and drive the same silicon from an IP routing stack.

The box noticed when a conversation was going to last a while and told the machine next to it to attach a label to those packets. After that the hardware moved them without the routing software looking at them again. Short-lived things like a DNS query stayed on the slow path. The company's own paper put the economics plainly: in 1996 a one-gigabit router cost around $187,000 and a five-gigabit ATM switch cost around $41,000. Ipsilon sold the switch itself as the ATM1600, sixteen ports for $46,000, and licensed the protocols to anyone building ATM hardware. Digital Equipment shipped a switch based on it. Ericsson and NEC and Fore Systems all signed licensing deals.

It failed, and it failed fast. Cabletron Systems put $20 million into the company in April 1997 for five percent. Eight months later Nokia announced on 9 December that it would buy the whole company for about $120 million, which valued Cabletron's stake at six million. The deal closed on 31 December 1997 and the name ended with it. In August 1996, sixteen months earlier, Lyon had told Red Herring: "We don't see ourselves as buyout bait."

~ the record ~

~ the author block ~

You can watch this company die in the header of an internet standard, which is not something most companies leave behind. RFC 1953, May 1996, specifies the Ipsilon Flow Management Protocol. The cover page lists seven authors, and six of the seven are followed by the word Ipsilon. The seventh is W. L. Edwards of Sprint, which is worth noticing on its own: a carrier was on the spec from the start.

RFC 2297 came out in March 1998, three months after the company stopped existing. It is the version 2.0 specification of the same protocol, it still has "Ipsilon's" in its title, and it has the identical author list. The affiliations have changed. Newman, Hinden, Hoffman and Lyon now read Nokia. Minshall reads Fiberlane, which became Cerent, which Cisco bought in 1999 for $6.9 billion. Ching Liaw has no affiliation at all. The same seven people had written the same protocol, and the column on the right of the page had been rewritten underneath them.

~ what the standards record actually says ~

The claim you will read everywhere is that Ipsilon's work led to MPLS. The IETF's own documents do not support it. RFC 3031, the MPLS architecture, does not contain the word Ipsilon anywhere, and the six people it thanks in its acknowledgments include nobody from this company. The flow management protocol that was the company's flagship is referenced by exactly two later documents in the entire series, one of which is its own companion.

What did survive is the other protocol. GSMP, the General Switch Management Protocol, was the part that let an outside controller drive a switch's forwarding hardware, and in June 2002 the IETF published version 3 of it as RFC 3292, standards track, written by people from a Swedish university and Nortel. Its acknowledgment reads: "GSMP was created by P. Newman, W. Edwards, R. Hinden, E. Hoffman, F. Ching Liaw, T. Lyon, and G. Minshall. This version of GSMP is based on their work." The standards body named all seven of them in June 2002, with the company four and a half years gone. And when the IRTF wrote its 2015 terminology document for software-defined networking, the thing it reached back for as an antecedent of separating control from forwarding was Ipsilon Flow Switching. The idea outlived the company by seventeen years and arrived under a different name.

~ the firewall business ~

Nokia did not want a router company for long. The useful detail is in Check Point's annual report for 1997, filed before the acquisition closed: Ipsilon was already one of six companies licensed to build FireWall-1 into its own equipment. That OEM deal, not the IP switching, is what Nokia actually ended up with. The acquiring entity was named Nokia IP, Inc., its product line became the Nokia IP security appliances, and the operating system on them was IPSO. Network World looked back in 2003 and said it was not clear Nokia had ever done anything with the switching technology, but that Ipsilon "formed the basis of its Internet Communications group."

Check Point bought that business back from Nokia in 2009, roughly 23,000 customers and more than 220,000 appliances, and folded IPSO into a new operating system. One piece of the original company went the whole distance under its own name: the web management interface shipped in 1996 as Ipsilon Network Voyager, became Nokia Network Voyager, and was still called Check Point Network Voyager on appliance documentation two decades later. Bob Hinden, Ipsilon's fourth employee and a co-inventor of IPv6, followed the same path and ended up a Fellow at Check Point. Brian NeSmith went to CacheFlow, which became Blue Coat Systems, and Nokia sued him and the company in 1999 for hiring its people.

ipsilon.com kept serving pages until the middle of 2003, but not its own. By the end of 1998 the domain's homepage was titled Nokia Internet Security and was advertising managed firewalls with Check Point. The only Ipsilon on the web now is a French intellectual property law firm with about twenty offices, which also holds ipsilon.net and ipsilon.eu. The networking company's address is unregistered.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »