Google, Facebook, and Amazon Have Forever Changed Computer Networking

JR Rivers once built networking hardware at Google. Now, he’s remaking the networking game for the rest of the world. Photo: Wired.com/Jon Snyder

Google, Facebook, and Amazon don’t sell networking switches. And they never will. But they’ve forever changed the way others sell them.

Networking switches are those things that send data across the massive data centers that drive the internet and the world’s private computer networks. Traditionally, big American companies like Cisco and Juniper dominated the switch market, selling rather expensive hardware that ran their own proprietary software.

But as Google, Facebook, and Amazon expanded their online operations to unprecedented sizes, the traditional gear didn’t really suit them. It was too expensive and too difficult to program. So they went to Asia for a simpler breed of networking hardware.

Basically, they arranged to run their own custom software on gear built by Asian manufacturers. At first, they kept these efforts on the down-low. And many dismissed the practice as something only the giants of the net would ever do. But now, the market is following suit.

Today, venerable hardware seller HP announced that it’s now selling “bare metal” networking switches—basic gear that anyone can load with their own software. That may seem like small news, but it represents an enormous shift in the hardware market. HP is following in the footsteps of both Juniper and Dell, another major hardware seller, in offering such switches.

“It’s all happening much faster than I thought,” says JR Rivers, the CEO of Cumulus Networks, a startup offering software for running box switches—software that will also be offered by HP.

For a brief time, Rivers helped design networking switches inside Google, and now, he’s directly pushing the same basic ideas to the rest of the market. Dell also sells the company’s software, which is based on the Linux open source operating system. Google built switches that it could load with its own networking software and modify as need be, and Cumulus lets companies do much the same.

Just last week, Facebook revealed that it’s now using its own switches and its own software inside its data centers. And Cisco downplayed the news. “Eight of the 10 largest Internet companies in the world are Cisco customers,” it said in a statement sent to WIRED. “Facebook has unique requirements that they are addressing with their own development.”

But the idea behind Facebook’s gear is hardly unique.

It’s not a complicated idea. It’s the same model that PCs and computer servers have used for so long, and it only makes sense. The hardware and the software are separate, and you can mix and match and modify as you see fit. It’s just that in the networking world, the idea was long overdue.