InsideTrack: Google making its own 10GbE switches in secret?

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The InsideTrack was recently pointed to Nyquist Capital’s blog, and their speculation that Google is building their own big switches.

It is our opinion that Google (GOOG) has designed and deployed home-grown 10GbE switches as part of a secret internal initiative that was launched when it realized commercial options couldn’t meet the cost and power consumption targets required for their data centers.

How, you might ask, do they come to this conclusion? By following the parts, of course.

We were watching shipments of SFP+ components for 10GbE in the market but simply couldn’t account for their end destination – sort of an optical component dark matter problem.

Which leads them to this opinion

Through conversations with multiple carrier, equipment, and component industry sources we have confirmed that Google has designed, built, and deployed homebrewed 10GbE switches for providing server interconnect within their data centers. This is very similar to Google’s efforts to build its own server computers (excellent article here). Google realized that because its computing needs were very specific, it could design and build computers that were cheaper and lower power than off the shelf alternatives. The decision to do so had a profound impact on server architecture and influenced the market’s move to lower power density solutions that Sun (JAVA) , Intel (INTC) and AMD (AMD) now embrace.