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Google's Dark Fibre Plans?
sebFlyte writes "According to news.com "Google is looking for Strategic Negotiator candidates with experience in...(i)dentification, selection, and negotiation of dark fiber contracts both in metropolitan areas and over long distances as part of development of a global backbone network." Is the search giant planning to build a global fibre-optic network?" Or perhaps simply use unused fibre that they can get for cheaper then from the datacenter providers; although at least from my talks with the datacenter folks, Google's not paying much per Mbps as it is.
Ah, so has Google unified String Theory, Dark Matter, and Dark Energy?
"Absorbing your worst..."
And thus it begins....it was difficult to see at first; what Google's plans were. Only after it had struck first using highspeed fiber to initiate the subroutines in the Google desktop search companion did humanity realize its vast mistake. Only it was too late...Google was selfaware...and it was hungry...for pie...I mean Pi...
Did you know you can be apathetic to apathy? Not that I give a shit...
The AMS-IX is the largest Internet Exchange / NAP in Europe.
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
Either that or they want to be able to sync their world-wide collection of data-servers in an 'accpetable' length of time.
A hollow heart and empty head makes the streets run red.
No no no.
Why the hell would Google want to buy up an existing ISP/telco with all the crap that that entails?
What they are doing is actually very sensible.
By looking to negotiate purchase/lease of dark fibre over the medium term they are avoiding the big cost which is actually putting fibre into the ground.
I imagine that they would ensure that the maintenance of that fibre is the responsibility of the provider, so they don't need to run their own maintenance crews either.
And the BIG plus with having access to fiber is that you can then ramp up your capacity by using WDM (Wave Division Multiplexing) to get more bandwidth out of your fibre.
They have probably realised that to ramp up their networks to cope with their future plans they need more bandwidth that they can afford to buy as "service" from a regular telco. Its just too damn expensive!
By leasing the fibre themselves, they light it how they want, rather that how the telco wants to sell it to them.
This *might* have biogger up front costs, but the recurrent costs are MUCH lower.
Hello,
Considering what Google has built internally for server management and redundancy, I would hypothesize based upon available data (i.e. GFS) that they're looking to light up fiber between their data centers, while running either TCP/IP or IPv6 (with modifications of existing IGP and routing protocols, more than likely BGP or OSPF) between them.
This is a very smart move on their part, if this is true. This would allow them to do their own internal traffic control and shaping over a private network, and develop/modify algorithms for efficient transfer of data over said network, without having to "play" by Telco/ISP rules.
In other words, they're more than likely building their own global network to more efficiently transfer data over the Internet by completely bypassing it for their inter-server traffic. This is a very smart move, if true.
Based on stuff I heard in another life, Google used to get transit contracts with the fastest connection they could get, but the lowest commited rate. The syncs used to take place in the proverbial top 5% of the 95th percentile.
As in: they used provider A for 36 hours, provider B for the next 36h, provider C for the next 36h, etc... (bear in mind it was not surfer facing transit, just used to sync up the DCs.)
They've probably reached the level where they've got too much data to get away with that scheme. So they've got a pretty simple choice:
- Pay for the commited rate they really need.
- Link the 2 Data Centers with dark fiber lit with 10GigE.
Based on the over provisionning most fiber companies did when they built their networks, there's a lot of room for negociation when you're shopping for fiber, especially when you can hang the promise of a huge internationnal network in the balance.
The second option is pretty much guaranted to turn out to be much more affordable.