3 ms·

Regardless of what people think of facebook and their business, this is a pretty big deal. As a very large tech company, they have the time and talent to develo

by SEJeff 12y ago

Regardless of what people think of facebook and their business, this is a pretty big deal. As a very large tech company, they have the time and talent to develop their own switches. If they are releasing the reference implementations, unlike google, this helps anyone else trying to build the next big web company. The more information the merrier.

tambourine_man 12y ago
Yes, but only because they lag behind Google in this regard. Companies embrace and propose open standards in the areas they don't dominate. As soon as you hit a core competitive advantage, they get as closed as possible.
- randartie 12y ago
  It's not because they don't "dominate" in the area of building network hardware that they release their designs. It's because this is not what gives Facebook an advantage in the social products space. There aren't better social networks out there that would thrive if only they had better network switches.
- planckscnst 12y ago
  I'm not so sure of this. Google has published multiple documents [1] mentioning the limitation of top-of-rack switching capacity and data center bisection bandwidth: how they need to design around it, and why it makes sense to use commodity switches despite the burden on software design. [1] Here is one less than a year old: http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/abs/10.2200/S00516ED2V01Y201306CAC024 http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/abs/10.2200/S00516ED2V01Y2...
  - magicalist 12y ago
    I didn't read it to see what you were referring to, but that's the second edition of an older book, so maybe they didn't update everything for the new edition. Google has been banging the software-defined networking drum for a while now (configuration is part of the compute engine APIs now, for instance[1]). [1] http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2014/04/enter-andromeda-zone-google-cloud-platforms-latest-networking-stack.html http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2014/04/enter-androm...
    - planckscnst 12y ago
      Yes, I just looked at the place where it specifically talks about switching costs (chapter 1 around page 18/19), and it hasn't changed.

by SEJeff 12y ago

tambourine_man 12y ago

Yes, but only because they lag behind Google in this regard. Companies embrace and propose open standards in the areas they don't dominate. As soon as you hit a core competitive advantage, they get as closed as possible.

randartie 12y ago
It's not because they don't "dominate" in the area of building network hardware that they release their designs. It's because this is not what gives Facebook an advantage in the social products space. There aren't better social networks out there that would thrive if only they had better network switches.
planckscnst 12y ago
I'm not so sure of this. Google has published multiple documents [1] mentioning the limitation of top-of-rack switching capacity and data center bisection bandwidth: how they need to design around it, and why it makes sense to use commodity switches despite the burden on software design. [1] Here is one less than a year old: http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/abs/10.2200/S00516ED2V01Y201306CAC024 http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/abs/10.2200/S00516ED2V01Y2...
- magicalist 12y ago
  I didn't read it to see what you were referring to, but that's the second edition of an older book, so maybe they didn't update everything for the new edition. Google has been banging the software-defined networking drum for a while now (configuration is part of the compute engine APIs now, for instance[1]). [1] http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2014/04/enter-andromeda-zone-google-cloud-platforms-latest-networking-stack.html http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2014/04/enter-androm...
  - planckscnst 12y ago
    Yes, I just looked at the place where it specifically talks about switching costs (chapter 1 around page 18/19), and it hasn't changed.