Brocade has hired Colin Dixon, an expert on Software-Defined Networking (SDN), as Principal Engineer to join the engineering leadership team of the Software Networking business unit at Brocade and focus on open source initiatives, such as OpenDaylight.
Previously, Dixon, who is considered an authority on SDN, specifically as it applies to scalable and distributed systems, served in various research roles at IBM Research’s Austin Lab, the University of Washington, Microsoft Research and Intel Research.
Brocade said 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.
