Google Networking Device Appears in Small-Town Iowa

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/09/pluto-switch/all/

by mkuhn • 14 years ago

148 35 14 years ago

scoopr• 14 years ago

Heh, I'm completely baffled why it has Finnish text on it. From the blurrypic I can make out "Laite on liitettävä suojamaadoituskoskettimella varustettuun pistorasiaan", which basically means "Device must be connected to grounded outlet"

itcmcgrath3• 14 years ago

Does Google have a data-center in Finland?

patdennis• 14 years ago

http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/locations/hamina/

itcmcgrath3• 14 years ago

I often hear about Google's custom hardware. Are there any other large tech companies (who are not hardware companies) that build/design their own hardware to run internally?

jamessb• 14 years ago

Facebook's Open Compute Project released plans for their custom hardware: http://opencompute.org/

Back Blaze open sourced their storage server designs (commodity parts in custom cases): http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v...

prostoalex• 14 years ago

Yeah, most major ones http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2011/11/server-world-be...

apaprocki3• 14 years ago

At Bloomberg, we design almost all of our branded hardware in-house, from the terminals (monitors/keyboards)[1] to the B-UNIT authentication devices[2]. There are also other internal datacenter hardware projects.

[1] http://i171.photobucket.com/albums/u298/winstontj/Trading/Ha... [2]: http://lh6.ggpht.com/_iHYDAo93tQY/S3m5Jd5nHOI/AAAAAAAAGY8/oB...

kanwisher• 14 years ago

White bunit ;( makes me miss my days there. Always surprised they never sold them, its the best authentication device I've seen.

jpdus• 14 years ago

BTW, do you know, why Bloomberg switched from the old, more comfortable B-Units (as pictured above) to the new black ones, which dont feature a full fingerprint reader any more (instead you have to slide your finger over a smaller sensor)? The old design was way more comfortable, faster and produced less errors in my experience...

eitally2• 14 years ago

For those who don't know, when folks talk about tech companies building their own hardware, they almost never mean that literally. The manufacturing (and often some joint design work) is farmed out to third parties like Pegatron, Compal, Quanta, Flextronics, Sanmina-SCI, Foxconn, etc). Even Google's Nexus Q, which they so proudly declared was designed & built in the USA, was still not built by Google themselves.

apaprocki3• 14 years ago

Although mass manufacturing is farmed out, we (Bloomberg) have a surface-mount fab in NYC for work done in-house that does not require volume.

ChuckMcM5• 14 years ago

Some, like Dell, Oracle, Apple, and HP are in the hardware design business so no surprises there, others like Facebook, Amazon, and Google have such large hardware needs that a significant amount of cost can be recovered by doing so, and others such as the wall street companies have specialized needs so it makes sense for them as well.

I was asked about custom hardware in an interview once and pointed out that it was pretty straight forward to go to a PC original device manufacturer (ODM) or OEM and say "I'd like an x86 architecture box that has these features ..." and get it built. The only question is whether or not that makes business sense or not.

wmf3• 14 years ago

The only question is whether or not that makes business sense or not.

And unfortunately there's still zero public information on that side of the equation, even from the Open Compute Project. I wonder how many customers are missing out because they don't even know to ask.

incision• 14 years ago

As I recall, Google has been producing switches [1] for some time now.

1: http://gigaom.com/2007/11/18/google-making-its-own-10gig-swi...

hastur• 14 years ago

If the big Goo asks the forum admin to take down the thread, let me know, I've made a copy.

niklas• 14 years ago

This is a bit of a longshot. But I am looking for switch hardware that have gigabit fiber and speaks OpenFlow for a FTTH project.

wmf3• 14 years ago

Find a BCM56534-based switch and put Indigo on it. Unfortunately my company only makes 10G OpenFlow switches which is probably overkill for FTTH.

adjohn• 14 years ago

Check out the Pica8 products - http://www.pica8.com/products/

ceautery• 14 years ago

The Wireshark capture showing BOOTP was interesting. I don't live in the networking world anymore, but I thought BOOTP had gone the way of Gopher by now.

jof• 14 years ago

BOOTP and DHCP use the same ports and general packet structure, so Wireshark has the dissectors grouped.

I was humored by that Wireshark screenshot. ARPs and DHCP/BOOTP requests from a freshly-booted device are not al that unusual.

noselasd2• 14 years ago

That's just a peculiarity of wireshark, it displays both DHCP and BOOTP as BOOTP in the oneline view. The packets are likely DHCP

ChuckMcM5• 14 years ago

Networks are a fundamental part of the Google infrastructure. Ask yourself a couple of questions and then you can answer the questions about Googles motivations.

1) Is there any switch that does only what you want? Have any of the features you didn't need interfered with your uptime?

2) In a 48 port high performance switch which is more expensive? The switch or the cables? Why?

So if you 'do the math' the obvious answer sort of pops out.

Disclaimer: I worked there and agreed not to discuss any platform technologies until such time as either Google talked about them publicly or they were disclosed by other means not related to me.

noselasd2• 14 years ago

Hasn't google already talked a bit about this ? They build (and possibly buy some) switches that's OpenFlow enabled, so they can among other things control the forwarding of many switches from a central control plane. e.g. http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/04/going-with-the-...

ChuckMcM5• 14 years ago

Yes they have talked about things from a software perspective but very little from a hardware/systems perspective. I keep hoping the Open Compute project comes out with a switch design.

dholowiski• 14 years ago

Is that agreement forever, or does it expire after x years? (or can you even say?)

ChuckMcM5• 14 years ago

To be honest I don't know. I do know that Google has a tendency to brag about things after they remove them from service so from a practical standpoint its not 'forever' but when I get home I'll check the language.

wethesheeple• 14 years ago

I love the "Who's online" section at the bottom of the "obscure" networking forum.

About 5 members and over 11,000 guests. It doesn't seem very "obscure" at the moment.

It's too bad PT Barnum is not alive today to see the thundering herds of the world wide web.

Google Networking Device Appears in Small-Town Iowa

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