Alum's startup on tech industry "watch list"

Tech industry insiders have their eye on a new player in the high-end server market.

Fabric7 Systems, cofounded by ECE alumnus Thomas Lovett (MSEE ‘79), is an enterprise server startup that takes its name from the seven layers of the ISO stack and a switched-fabric technology inside its “killer servers.” Fabric7 was selected as one of “15 Tech Start-ups to Watch” by Infoworld for its “creative energy” and “singular ingenuity.” The wellsprings for that ingenious energy come from Lovett and fellow UIUC alumnus Sharad Mehrotra (PhD CS ‘96). Both are Fabric7 cofounders and serve on the company’s executive team. Lovett serves as chief server architect, Mehrotra as president and CEO.

“We talked with a lot of customers and it became evident that the major vendors were not leveraging many of the key innovations in processors, networking technologies, and software that were going to cause major inflections in server design over the next decade,” said Mehrotra. “As a result, we believed that if we could harness technologies like Opteron CPUs from AMD, 10 gigabit Ethernet, and 64-bit operating systems such as Linux and Windows, for example, then we would really be able to give customers something they needed. Add to that our deep insights into advanced multiprocessor architectures and carrier-class networking, and we felt that we had an unfair advantage over the incumbents and could disrupt the status quo in an industry where the primary players are incredibly entrenched. That insight has been our guiding principle in developing the fabric computing architecture and we’re glad to see customers already adopting our approach.”

This Silicon Valley startup is boldly taking on the likes of Hewlett Packard, IBM, and Sun Microsystems with its new high-end servers. Combining microprocessors from Advanced Micro Devices and high-speed networking technology, the performance of Fabric7 servers is competitive with proprietary, often pricey RISC/Unix servers from the likes of the giants cited above—at about a quarter of the cost. Beyond low cost, the key selling point of the Fabric7 server is its capability of providing mainframe-style virtualization. AMD Accelerate, in its Summer 2006 issue, details the innovations that make Fabric7’s Q160 server “a killer server”—details that inspired the magazine to suggest the Eagles’ “Take it to the Limit” as a company theme song.

It is tempting to call Fabric7 a David taking on a Goliath, but this “David” has high-tech innovation, enormous intelligence, and $50 million in venture capital in its slingshot. Lovett previously designed x86 servers for Sequent Computer Systems. As chief architect for Sequent’s NUMA-Q series systems, he helped build some of the world’s fastest computers for transaction processing and helped grow Sequent to an $800M company. Later, Lovett served as a Distinguished Engineer with IBM. Mehrotra, a Sun Microsystems veteran, previously cofounded and led a networking startup called Procket Network, which raised $300 million before Cisco Systems purchased it in 2004.