Google Opens Up About Its Network

Unusually, Google is putting its mouth where its money is. Company representatives appeared at a computer networking conference in Santa Clara (CA) to discuss some of Google’s data center network workings. It has disclosed that its data centers have moved over to an advanced system dominated by software, instead of traditional hardware of custom switches and routers. The industry calls it a software defined network or SDN.

Google has been famously close-mouthed about how it runs its internal systems because it considers every engineering innovation as potentially strategic. Google is going public with this work, according to a senior engineer, to accelerate change throughout the Internet. “Lots of people talk about the importance of software virtualization in the data center servers. We thought it is just as big a deal in the wide-area network,” said Urs Hölzle, senior vice president of technical infrastructure at Google, and one of its first 10 employees. “It’s not competitive for us, and it will help the Internet grow faster. That’s good for us.” The participation does not exactly signify a sea change in Google’s approach. While Google has contributed some bug fixes to associated open source projects, Hölzle said Google would not be donating its networking software to any open source project. “It is very specialized,” he said.