Google Networking Device Appears in Small-Town Iowa • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Networking Device Appears in Small-Town Iowa

#21

Post by eitally » Mon, Sep 10, 2012, 4:06 PM UTC

itcmcgrath wrote: post #4

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?

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.

Re: Google Networking Device Appears in Small-Town Iowa

#22

Post by eitally » Mon, Sep 10, 2012, 4:06 PM UTC

itcmcgrath wrote: post #4

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?

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.

Re: Google Networking Device Appears in Small-Town Iowa

#23

Post by eitally » Mon, Sep 10, 2012, 4:08 PM UTC

patdennis wrote: post #7

itcmcgrath wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Google have a data-center in Finland?

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

Indeed. It could also have been manufactured for them by Elcoteq (Finnish EMS company).

Re: Google Networking Device Appears in Small-Town Iowa

#24

Post by wmf » Mon, Sep 10, 2012, 4:21 PM UTC

niklas wrote: post #12

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.

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

Re: Google Networking Device Appears in Small-Town Iowa

#25

Post by jof » Mon, Sep 10, 2012, 5:22 PM UTC

ceautery wrote: post #17

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.

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.

Re: Google Networking Device Appears in Small-Town Iowa

#26

Post by noselasd » Mon, Sep 10, 2012, 5:35 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #20

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 ans…

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-...

Re: Google Networking Device Appears in Small-Town Iowa

#27

Post by noselasd » Mon, Sep 10, 2012, 5:40 PM UTC

ceautery wrote: post #17

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.

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

Re: Google Networking Device Appears in Small-Town Iowa

#28

Post by ChuckMcM » Mon, Sep 10, 2012, 5:44 PM UTC

noselasd wrote: post #26

ChuckMcM wrote: post #20

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 ans…

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-...

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.

Re: Google Networking Device Appears in Small-Town Iowa

#29

Post by ChuckMcM » Mon, Sep 10, 2012, 5:49 PM UTC

itcmcgrath wrote: post #4

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?

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.

Re: Google Networking Device Appears in Small-Town Iowa

#30

Post by apaprocki » Mon, Sep 10, 2012, 6:02 PM UTC

jpdus wrote: post #19

apaprocki wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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...

The quality of scan in the swipe sensors is actually better than the older area sensors and they also cost less and take up less space on the circuit board. Perhaps the enrollment scan you did was not as good as it could have been and you should re-enroll to capture a better fingerprint.