It’s all about the cluster

Scoble and Joel Spolsky seem to be having fun playing “we’re better than you are”. Ignoring all that, while reading Joel’s rant I came across his post on “Network Load Balancing Works”.

NICE! Always great to see NLB get some due credit. I used to work on NLB back when we were Valence Research and NLB was Convoy Cluster Software (and we were the worlds smallest software company, or so we liked to claim). Then MS’ snapped us up, we loaded the cars and left Portland for Redmond.

Convoy became WLBS in NT4, then NLB in Win2000 and beyond. And after a year or two of integrating Convoy into MS, all of us moved on to other things – I’m working with college students, Kyril is off running the WIndows HPC team , Bill started another software company, Dan took a year off and moved with his family to Mexico, and I’ve lost track of Kosta (back in Oregon, I hear).

NLB was so much fun to work with, especially back at Valence, because it was so easy for people to “get” why it worked so well. Small (fit on a floppy), cheap, faster, no single POF, scalable as hell. Damn fun to demo as well – clusters always are, for the geeks like me in the room at least. And the afternoon beer runs to the Beaverton McMennamin’s (take out Hammerhead in a jar…mmmmm) certainly kept the atmosphere just right.

Anyway, I ramble. Thanks Joel for inspiring the flashback, and enjoy NLB.