Pete Johnson joins ProfitBricks after a 19-year career with HP
Infrastructure as a service provider ProfitBricks announced on Tuesday that it has named Pete Johnson senior director of platform evangelism.
Johnson joins ProfitBricks after a 19-year career with HP where he worked in various roles, most recently with its new public cloud offering where he was responsible for project management of web development teams, customer facing demonstrations at trade shows, and sales.
According to a lengthy post on the ProfitBricks blog, Johnson left HP to become the platform evangelist for ProfitBricks because of its use of InfiniBand technology.
“InfiniBand, which is a popular 21st century technology in the supercomputing and high-performance computing communities, uses a grid or mesh system that gives packets multiple paths from point A to point B,” Johnson says. “This key difference, among other nuances, gives InfiniBand a top speed of 80 Gbits/sec, resulting in a speed that is 80x faster than Amazon’s AWS 1Gbit/sec standard Ethernet connections.”
Johnson says that InfiniBand helps ProfitBricks maximize physical hardware and keep prices competitive, and helps customers provision any combination of CPU cores and RAM, and change the number of CPU cores or amount of RAM on the fly without rebooting the VM.
“You can’t change virtual hardware on a VM without rebooting it, can you? Do you suppose I’d check that out before leaving the only employer I’ve ever known in my adult life?” Johnson says. “I spun up a VM, installed Apache, launched a load test from my desktop against the web server I just created, changed both the CPU cores and RAM on the server instance, confirmed the change at the VM command line, and allowed the load test to end. You know what the load test log showed? Number of errors: 0.”
The style of announcement is different than a typical appointment press release in that it actually allows Johnson to flex his evangelist muscles. It seems that he left a successful career at HP because he is legitimately excited about what ProfitBricks has to offer, and is happy to share it with others. Platform evangelism has become a more prominent role at technology companies over the past few years, with Guy Kawasaki and Robert Scoble being good examples.
InfiniBand helped ProfitBricks outperform AWS and Rackspace in a recent test by CloudSpectator, and has been added to other cloud hosting platforms as well, including Atlantic.Net. Atlantic.Net says that InfiniBand technology speeds cloud server provisioning and reduces infrastructure costs.
Talk back: Do you have a platform evangelist in your organization? What are your thoughts around Pete Johnson’s ProfitBricks appointment? Let us know in a comment.
About Nicole Henderson
Nicole Henderson is the Editor in Chief of the Web Host Industry Review where she covers daily news and features online, as well as in print. She has a bachelor of journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto. You can find her on Twitter @NicoleHenderson.
