Massive Data Center Network

Google Gives Glimpse Inside Its Massive Data Center Network

Google's data center network delivers 1-petabit-per-second bandwidth capacity, enough to read scanned contents of Library of Congress in one-tenth of a second.

Anyone wondering just how much network capacity it takes for Google to deliver all of its myriad services might want to consider this: The company's current-generation data center networks deliver enough bandwidth to read the entire scanned contents of the Library of Congress in less than one-tenth of one second.

Amin Vahdat, a Google Fellow and technical lead for networking, provided a rare glimpse inside the company's data center networks in a blog post coinciding with the Open Network Summit earlier this week.

According to Vahdat, Google's current data center network fabric, dubbed Jupiter, can deliver more than 1 petabit per second of total bisection bandwidth, or enough capacity for 100,000 servers to exchange information at 10 gigabits per second per server.

Jupiter is the result of about 10 years' worth of effort building in-house network hardware and software for linking Google's data centers and powering the company's distributed computing and storage systems, Vahdat said. "When Google was getting started, no one made a data center network that could meet our distributed computing requirements," he explained. From the beginning, the company has realized that computing infrastructures such as Google File System, MapReduce, Bigtable and Borg require a networking capability not available from others, he said.

Source : - eweek