In mid-November, Andrew Schmitt broke news on his blog, nyquistcapital.com—which covers optical-fiber markets—about “Google’s Secret 10GbE Switch,” as the headline called it. In short, Schmitt opines, Google has been unsatisfied with any and all vendors’ 10-Gigabit Ethernet optical switches, so the secretive search behemoth built its own.
In predictable fashion, the company is not revealing details about its infrastructure. The blogger’s full story, as well as just under 50 comments at the time of this writing, can be read at nyquistcapital.com, including the statement that Google currently uses 5,000 ports of 10GbE per month.
My esteemed colleague, Stephen Hardy, a former editorial director of Connector Specifier and currently editorial director and associate publisher of sister franchise Lightwave, has followed the story and attempted to get confirmation from Google. While the company would not offer confirmation, they offered no denial either.
While on the subject of sister franchises, PennWell’s Cabling Installation & Maintenance recently conducted a survey of enterprise-class cabling-system end users, in which the topic of 10GbE appeared a few times. In particular, 10.1% of those end users surveyed said they currently deploy 10GbE as the backbone technology for their data-communications systems. Gigabit Ethernet garnered the largest market share at 39.1%, followed by Fast Ethernet (100 Mbits/sec) at 30%.
When asked what backbone technology they’ll deploy once their next upgrade is complete, 34.4% said they’ll be using 10GbE. That 24.3% market-share increase is gargantuan, and must include some users who plan to leapfrog Gigabit speed, and go from Fast Ethernet to 10GbE.
How many of those users will “do The Google,” as our nation’s President might (or actually, did) say, and set about building their own 10GbE switches because they’re dissatisfied with off-the-shelf boxes? Well, Cabling Installation & Maintenance didn’t have the foresight to ask that in its survey, but I’ll go out on a limb and say that 0.0% of the end users surveyed are planning on doing so. And probably 0.0% of the world’s end users who were not surveyed are planning to follow Google’s lead by building their own switches.
So, I don’t expect that any switch manufacturers are scurrying to their board rooms and changing business strategies out of fear that they no longer provide value to their customers. I do believe, however, that there is a lesson here. You may recall the space we devoted over the second half of this year to the IEEE meetings at which the group decided to move ahead with both 40- and 100-Gig specifications. One message that came through loud and clear from the reports out of those meetings is that mega users—Google and Yahoo! among them—are ready to consume 100GbE silicon immediately. And if one of those parties has already been dissatisfied enough with off-the-shelf 10GbE offerings to build their own, then what are the chances it will wait to see what the market’s vendors come up with in the 100GbE space before engineering its own solution?
That was a rhetorical question; there’s little doubt in my mind that Google engineers are hard at work doing as much 100GbE switch design as they possibly can as 2007 draws to a close.
Another, more gossipy observation from this year’s IEEE 40-/100-Gig hubbub was that the organizations that represent the group’s collection of 800-pound gorillas were introduced to a set of 1,200-pound gorillas—these mega users. While those 800-pound gorillas may still have their way with enterprise-class end users like those surveyed by Cabling Installation & Maintenance, they very likely will continue to find themselves feasting on humble pie when dining with the world’s most connected—and most capable—users.
Patrick McLaughlin,
Chief Editor
patrick@pennwell.com
