Brocade announced the hiring of networking and open-source veteran Colin Dixon to the position of Principal Engineer. An active contributor to the OpenDaylight Project, Dixon is considered a foremost authority on Software-Defined Networking (SDN), specifically as it applies to scalable and distributed systems.
Dixon has spent the past decade focused on the advancement of networking, protocols and data center technologies through his academic and industry research initiatives. His most recent work examined how to build network fabrics using commodity Ethernet hardware controlled by software running on servers. This includes building millisecond-scale monitoring and control capabilities, hardware-agnostic multipath forwarding and practical support for lossless Ethernet.
Previously, Dixon worked on building enterprise networks using what the industry today refers to as Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) long before any such term existed. His research also spanned to far-reaching areas such as enabling the “Internet of Things” deployments in the home as part of the End to the Middle (ETTM) and HomeOS research projects.
Dixon’s work on SDN has been recognized industry-wide, including within the OpenDaylight Project. Upon the formation of the project, he co-authored the “Dixon-Erickson OpenDaylight Merged Controller Proposal,” which now serves as the core controller plan of record for the Project. Previously, Dixon served in various research roles at IBM Research’s Austin Lab, the University of Washington, Microsoft Research and Intel Research.
Dixon will join the engineering leadership team of the Software Networking business unit at Brocade and focus on open source initiatives, such as OpenDaylight. Other notable software networking and open source hires this year at Brocade include Tom Nadeau and Benson Schliesser.
