Google's data centers grow too fast for normal networks, so it builds its own
Google has been building its own software-defined data-center networks for 10 years because traditional gear can’t handle the scale of what are essentially warehouse-sized computers.
The company hasn’t said much before about that homegrown infrastructure, but one of its networking chiefs provided some details on Wednesday at Open Network Summit and in a blog post.
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.
