Google can do it all on their own

Last year at ONS, Google announced they had built their own switches, OpenFlow controller, Traffic Engineering algorithms, and were using OpenFlow on their Wide Area Network links.  This year, Vint Cerf, Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist announced they are also using OpenFlow in their data centers, not just between them anymore.  So, what can’t Google do on their own and where could they use some help from the vendors out there?  This was a question asked to Amin Vahdat, Distinguished Engineer at Google, during a panel discussion during this year’s Open Networking Summit. 

In Vahdat’s answer, you didn’t really hear anything concrete, but the point he did make was vendors need to open up their platforms in order to take full advantage of the ASCIS on board network devices.  I also heard this from someone who works at another web scale giant during a lunch table discussion.  It seems that some chips can do much more than advertised.  For example, some chips can handle MPLS, but the hardware abstraction layer (HAL) or software abstraction layer provided by the vendors does not permit them to take advantage of such functionality.   In the example that I heard, I’m not sure if it was the Broadcom HAL being referred to or if it was another abstraction layer created by another vendor, but the underlying point I was hearing was too many abstraction layers limits things and these guys want DIRECT access.  Each layer of abstraction on a switch limits the amount of hardware programmability they get to take advantage of; could be another reason why Google built their own switch, in addition to the big reason that no vendor at the time offered  256 port 10G switches several years ago when they first built theirs.

Does anyone have concrete examples of this with certain vendors, chipsets, HALs, SALs, etc.?  This is an area that I’m interested in and don’t have much direct experience with.  Any other data that can be shared would be great.  Feel free to leave a comment or write in privately.

On a related note, I know someone *cough* (@networkstatic) *cough* who is dying to get access to the new Unified Access Data Plane (UDAP) ASIC that offers a programmable data plane onboard the new Cisco 3850 Converged Access Layer switches.  Will this be opened up to the public?

Vendors need to unleash the beast  to really show off hardware programmability.



Thanks,
Jason

Twitter: @jedelman8