Networking. It’s one of the most critical elements of a datacenter, connecting machines, applications and locations to one another to transfer information, data and documents. Its what enables your mobile device to provide you with access to your email, to send messages to your friends, to post photos to social networks and to check in at the places you visit.

And yet the only time you think about it is when it’s not there!

Amin Vahdat, Google’s Technical Fellow for Networking posted today on the Google Research blog details about the investments that Google has made in networking in order to deliver on our stated mission to organize the world’s information and to make it universally accessible.  As Amin states, ten years ago we realized that we could not purchase, at any price, a datacenter network that could meet the combination of our scale and speed requirements.

So we built our own!

To date, we have built and deployed five generations of our datacenter network infrastructure. Our latest-generation Jupiter network has improved capacity by more than 100x relative to our first generation network, delivering more than 1 petabit/sec of total bisection bandwidth. To put this in perspective, this provides capacity for 100,000 servers to exchange information at 10Gb/s each, enough to read the entire scanned contents of the Library of Congress in less than 1/10th of a second.

Here is a look at the hardware innovations over the years:
Firehose (2005-2006)
  • Chassis based solution (but no backplane)
  • Bulky CX4 copper cables restrict scale

WatchTower (2008)
  • Chassis with backplane
  • Fiber (10G) in all stages
  • Scale to 82 Tbps fabric
  • Global deployment

Saturn (2009)
  • 288x10G port chassis
  • Enables 10G to hosts
  • Scales to 207 Tbps fabric
  • Reuse in WAN








Jupiter (2012)
  • Enables 40G to hosts
  • External control servers
  • OpenFlow



 All of this innovation in networking is available to you as a customer of Google Cloud Platform through Cloud Networking. Cloud Networking provides three key capabilities to our customers:
  • Cloud Interconnect - connect your datacenter to ours through an encrypted VPN, Direct Peering or via your Carrier.
  • Load Balancing - spread load across applications with HTTP/S or across machines with TCP/UDP.
  • Cloud DNS - Reliable and low latency DNS serving from Google's worldwide network of Anycast DNS servers

You can learn more about Cloud Networking at cloud.google.com/networking and in the documentation. You can also dive into the technical details on five generations of our in-house data center network architecture by downloading the whitepaper.

- Posted by Adam Hall, Head of Technical Product Marketing, Cloud Platform