2 ms·

Both FB and Google still buy a ton of equipment from Cisco..

• evgen 8y ago
  Less and less every year. Five years ago the entire DC used third-party networking gear from top to bottom. The top of rack switch was the first thing to go, replaced with an in-house device that could do the job well and that provided flexibility for future plans. Load balancers (there was almost a contest to see who could get to be the ones to take a sledgehammer to those F5 pieces of shit) and cluster switches were next; at that point you had an entire fabric of custom-made kit that would do rack-level BGP. Intra-cluster and gateway switches are the remaining big iron, or at least were when I left, and I am not sure it will ever be worthwhile for Facebook to invest in the hardware necessary for those tasks. Expensive kit for sure, but the spend with third-party networking gear companies dropped by at least an order of magnitude over less than a decade.