Google Router Rumors 267
An anonymous reader writes "There's a new rumor that Google is developing its own router. The company won't comment on the story, but it's been in the hardware business for a while and expanded its presence with Android. If Larry Ellison can go halvsies with HP on a server, then Eric Schmidt should certainly be able to make Cisco nervous."
In My Opinion, Cisco Should Be Worried (Score:5, Interesting)
I seem to remember rumors of them building their own insane (10 GbE) hardware switches [nyquistcapital.com]. And I don't think that's hard to imagine as nothing on the market at the time could possibly meet their needs.
... like many claims they could not be operating on TCP/IP stacks on the inside. Because it's such a resource hog in some respects but that's irrelevant--I'm certain they can apply some of their ideas universally. I would put my money on them being the leader in research on networks and network theory ... probably past Cisco even (although behind the NSA as no one's ever sure about those guys). I feel that networking is so closely tied to their bread and butter search application that they should be dumping huge R&D into that field. I can't offer proof but it certainly makes sense to me.
Of course, there's a lot of questions that remain to be answered
And all I can say is that it's about time someone put pressure on the home & enterprise networking hardware companies. What a stagnant squabbling market that has become.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:In My Opinion, Cisco Should Be Worried (Score:5, Interesting)
"And all I can say is that it's about time someone put pressure on the home & enterprise networking hardware companies. What a stagnant squabbling market that has become."
If they do get into network tech, I seriously hope they release some home routers. I'm probably not the only one tired of having to reboot home routers every so often, especially with multiple people connected and having their wireless connection suddenly drop.
Re:In My Opinion, Cisco Should Be Worried (Score:4, Interesting)
There are plenty of options for robust routers, even smallish ones; but the cost of entry will be 2 or 3 times higher than the cheapies.
doing it right (Score:3, Interesting)
1) raise the barrier to entry, no point issuing a device that anyone could make with Linux and a '386. Also, many cisco routers (eg. the 1800 series) genuinely represent value for money.
2) Provide good quality support.
So to raise the barrier to entry, it has to be a pretty special product, maybe doing the most useful 80% of what a cisco does flawlessly and improving upon cisco in come other areas (ones I can think off of the top of my head are ease of deployment and virtualization (vrf)).
The other reason people insist on Cisco, even when there are other cheaper options, is that they believe Cisco support their product well with training and technical support. This in my experience is an illusion. By and large the Cisco TAC is awful and maintaining certification is expensive and time consuming and the training materials are riddled with misprints, bugs and corporate "best practices" that are self-serving to Cisco.
So Google have a huge hill to climb, but I'm sure that it can be done in the space of a couple of years.
Re:In My Opinion, Cisco Should Be Worried (Score:5, Interesting)
Mostly seems to stem from power fluctuations, google search [google.co.uk] brings up nothing specific, but anecdotal evidence on my part and some customers seem to agree. Anyone else have this?
Re:All that I need now is google underwear! (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't hold your breath, have you seen the Google Appliance [google.com]?
Re:If they do (Score:4, Interesting)
I really hope they throw in IPv6. There are no consumer-level routers available with IPv6 support; it's been driving me crazy. Everyone will probably be forced to buy new routers in a few years anyway.
With that said, I think Google is probably developing a router for their own in-house use. I have doubts this will actually hit the consumer market.
Re:In My Opinion, Cisco Should Be Worried (Score:1, Interesting)
"I'm probably not the only one tired of having to reboot home routers every so often..."
Get a Soekris box [soekris.com] and roll your own firewall/router. It is not hard to do. My uptime is measured by any changes I make to it.
Re:Google was just trying to save money (Score:5, Interesting)
Too right on this point. I used to work for Cisco, and was always amazed at the number of bugs filed by customers around really obscure and esoteric features. Every one of those obscure features is in IOS because somebody (usually somebody big with deep pockets) is still using it... Even simple things like OSPF timers - they all have to be adjustable, because some big shop has decided that they can squeeze an extra .1% of bandwidth out of their pipes by fiddling with those timers - and if your new box requires them to reconfigure their whole network to standards (or worse yet, to the values that worked best in Google's network) they're not going to be very interested...
Re:Google was just trying to save money (Score:2, Interesting)
> ...it probably isn't surprising that they wanted to develop their own routers from
> scratch instead of paying through the nose for Cisco or Juniper devices, especially
> since they needed hundreds or thousands of them and really don't want to have to pay
> for support contracts.
When you buy thousands of routers you get them customized to your exact needs and you get whatever support arrangement you desire including complete drawings and source code.
Re:TFA says Juniper is doomed. Not so fast. (Score:5, Interesting)
Or Google could buy Juniper. Let the rumor drive down the stock and pick them up at fire sale prices.
Mod AC Informative (Score:2, Interesting)
Post is exactly right. The ASICs are already out there and in use by pretty much everyone for their COTS routers.
When one gets into the carrier-scale equipment I don't have a clue how that stuff goes. But I've seen enough low-end ( $10,000) routers taken apart to know that AC's comments are accurate.
Re:All that I need now is google underwear! (Score:3, Interesting)
CISCO has nothing to fear (Score:3, Interesting)
Why go bringing CISCO into this. Apart from creating products people want to use (gmail, search, etc..) google has two main focuses: building a back end able to efficiently run those applications and ensuring the consumer has easy access to those services.
Android and google's actions in the spectrum market weren't made just to fuck around with products outside their core competencies. They were strategic moves made to ensure that customers on mobile devices didn't end up directed away from google products by someone controlling the network or providing the handset.
Similarly google isn't about to start competing in the router market just for kicks. It's outside of their core competencies and the potential for profit simply wouldn't justify the resource expenditure.
Likely google is working on a custom router to help make their backend more efficient. To take an educated guess I would imagine that they want to build in intelligent load balancing into their routers. In other words have the routers maintain information about where certain kinds of data live and/or what machines are heavily loaded and then intelligently send requests for computations to lightly loaded nodes near the data. They might also want to simply build in custom handling of packets for things like GFS.
Not only will google not bother to compete in the router market but I suspect they won't even allow the technology they use for this to escape the company. After all most of the people who would benefit from this kind of optimization are their direct competitors.
Re:TFA says Juniper is doomed. Not so fast. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:In My Opinion, Cisco Should Be Worried (Score:5, Interesting)
Isn't Juniper's business plan to install FreeBSD on cheap embedded hardware and pretend that it's special-secret-proprietary-magic? I wouldn't be surprised if Google could undercut them, for in-house use at the very least.
This is not really true. On the higher end Juniper boxes, while the control plane is running FreeBSD, the real work is done on the forwarding plane which is comprised of custom ASICs. You can't route at an enterprise or carrier level using commodity hardware.
If Google is building an in-house router, it's down to the hardware design level. Either they're developing their own ASICs (plausible) or they're using merchant silicon (even more plausible) and rolling their own OS and chassis.
jeesh... (Score:1, Interesting)
This is so old. As a former datacenter employee.
Yes it's happened. They've designed their own layer 3 switches, routers, etc.
Now get over it.
Re:If they do (Score:3, Interesting)
The lines between software and hardware are actually really blurry. Most NICs, for example, have hardware which assists in manipulating packets--anything from simply managing the checksums to VLAN tagging. Some cards even come with prioritization in the ASIC. Then you get highly programmable NICs which basically include an FPGA and a programming interface. With these, you can implement a somewhat arbitrary portion of the TCP/IP stack in the FPGA.
"But it's still softare!" you may cry. Well, maybe. But that's the point. The line between software and hardware is wide and blurry these days which, incidentally, is part of the reason why we have binary blogs for wireless drivers in the Linux kernel (they're basically firmware for the cards which the OS loads on boot.)
So saying "the software level" really just doesn't make sense. The layers in the OSI model don't distinguish between hardware and software--in fact, software isn't really mentioned except in layer 7 (the application layer.)
Re:Not in "hardware business," won't sell routers (Score:4, Interesting)
Huh? Gigabit ethernet is "hardly relevant"? What world are you living on?
The world of high performance networking. GigE is "hardly relevant" to the notion of building your own router because it's now ubiquitous. Everyone can do GigE and cheaply. There's really no money to be saved by building your own GigE router. 10 GigE is what everyone needs. If Google is building any hardware, rest assured it's for non-blocking 10 GigE port density and price.
Well, it's hard to refute a statement that uses marketing-speak like "enterprise-level pps performance". A commodity PC can achieve gigabit throughput, though
It's not marketing-speak. Poor packets per second performance is a common problem with networking gear. In actuality, it's a very normal "market-speak" thing to quote Gbps numbers without specifying packet size (like you did). Do you know the difference between being able to forward 64 byte packets at GigE and 1500 byte packets at GigE? Hint: small frames/packets can often kill commodity PC routers. So saying something "can achieve 2-3 Gbps" is meaningless if you don't specify a packet size.
And to be clear, Vyatta might very well be able to do 2-3 Gbps with 64 byte packets. Google really wouldn't care though, as 2-3 Gbps is nothing.
Re:Not in "hardware business," won't sell routers (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course it's with 64-byte packets: that's the common lingo of network hardware manufacturers. You can find similar throughput measurements on every piece of Cisco or Juniper equipment. Anyone that quotes bandwidth throughput in passing will use the 64-byte figure, since it's always the highest one.
Um. No. It's not the highest one. It's typically the lowest one. As I said before, small packets kill PC based routers.
Vyatt'a own paper [vyatta.com] shows it.