BAD HARDWARE WEEK

 Three-and-a-half years ago, a strange computing device appeared at an office building in the tiny farmland town of Shelby, Iowa. Google runs a data center not far from Shelby, and apparently, someone had sent the switch (pic above) to the wrong place.

The current network design, which powers all of Google’s data centers, has a maximum capacity of 1.13 petabits per second. That’s more than 100 times as much as the first data-center network Google developed 10 years ago. The network is a hierarchical design with three tiers of switches, but they all use the same commodity chips. And it’s not controlled by standard protocols but by software that treats all the switches as one.

A decade ago, Google built its networks like everyone else did. It bought enormous “cluster switches” from companies like Cisco. Inside each data center, these served as the backbone of the network. “They were essentially mainframes,” PortLand held promise for supporting a plug-and-play large-scale, data center network. Emerging mega data centers hosting100,000+ compute nodes.

Google was at the forefront of the move to 10-gigabit Ethernet networks, and the technology is now starting to spread across the industry. Facebook just recently moved to 10-gigabit Ethernet inside its new data center in western North Carolina.
Well, stop guessing. Google uses 40 Gbps Ethernet.


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99% BAD HARDWARE WEEK: Pluto switch, Jupiter network, Google seems has some Galaxy networking ambitions ?? Idea os software defined network seems simple, but traditionally, computer networks have not worked this way, forcing technicians to make individual changes to individual devices if they wanted to revamp or expand their networks. Until now, Google has kept quiet about its work. And to a certain extent, it continues to do so. Vahdat will not discuss the particulars of Google’s latest technologies, and the company is not open sourcing any of its work, something Microsoft has done, according to Russinovich. But more than anyone else, the company shows where the world of networking is moving.