Fabric7 was founded to build what would today be referred to as a ‘hyper-converged’ server, that is, one that integrates high capacity switching, storage and CPU into a coherently managed server appliance. I joined as the first software hire/manager and built up a team of 15 or so engineers who were tasked with implementing all of the management software for this device. With hindsight this was a very ambitious undertaking and we made more progress than could reasonably have been expected. One piece of good fortune for us was that we were able to hire some of the people and buy at auction the software assets of a long-running networking startup that failed to get funding as the VC market turned sour. This one piece of luck allowed us to get the networking stack going fairly quickly. The company raised several rounds of funding and eventually completed the appliance but as is often the case for technology startups it was ahead of the market and was eventually wound down some 5 years later. About 5 years after that, Nutanix successfully launched a very similar product.