Mystery Google Device Appears in Small-Town Iowa
January 7th, 2013This is a few months old.
Google has created some very unusual networking hardware for use in their datacenters. Some of this gear had been delivered to outsiders by mistake and information about it wound up on a networking equipment bulletin board.
My guess is that these switches might contain application specific silicon which would give Google much faster throughput than commodity gear could offer.
But custom ports??? Why not use standard optical interfaces?
My guess is that these are some form of custom parallel optical interface technology for extremely fast data rates over relatively short distances in the data center.
Via: Wired:
Photos of the mystery computing device appeared on the web in late February. Taken with a smartphone, they were a bit washed out and a little blurry in places, but you could easily read the name printed on the long, thin piece of hardware. “Pluto Switch,” the label said.
The images were posted by two men who said the device had unexpectedly turned up at a branch office in the tiny farmland town of Shelby, Iowa — population: 641 — and they were hoping someone could tell them what it was.
Clearly, these two men were familiar with the ins and outs of computer networking, and clearly, this was a networking switch, a way of shuttling data between machines. But they’d never heard of the Pluto Switch, and it was littered with networking ports they’d never seen before. “Any ideas?” they asked. “The writing on the back is Finnish.”
According to posts they made to an obscure web discussion forum dedicated to networking hardware — networking-forum.com — they couldn’t actually get the thing to work. But they turned up a few clues indicating who the device belonged to, and eventually, after putting two and two together, they said they’d located the owner and sent the switch back.
It belonged, they said, to Google.
Research Credit: RP
