Google continues building a World Class Network

Too many times the data center issues are separate from networking issues.  Many times there have been so-called innovative data centers that are promoted, and when you dig behind the scenes the network is not up to the same quality as the data center.  Google is one of those who accounts for the relationship of the network with its data centers at all kinds of levels, and they invest long term to have best of breed network.

The latest announcement has Google’s Urs Hoelzle posting on a new Japan-USA 60 Tbps connection.

At Google we want our products to be fast and reliable, and that requires a great network infrastructure, whether it's for the more than a billion Android users or developers building products on Google Cloud Platform. And sometimes the fastest path requires going through an ocean. That’s why we’re investing in FASTER, a new undersea cable that will connect major West Coast cities in the US to two coastal locations in Japan with a design capacity of 60 Tbps (that's about ten million times faster than your cable modem). Along with our previous investments - UNITY in 2008 and SJC (South-East Asia Japan Cable) in 2011, FASTER will make the internet, well, faster and more reliable for our users in Asia. 

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The 6 partners represent Japan, China, Singapore, Malaysia, and USA (Google).

I think we can look forward to more consortiums networking the world.  Does your data center group have connections with the leading network thought leaders?

One of the interesting things to see is how Urs’s post is shared.  Not the upper right where there is an independent share of the fiber network project in Korea.

Google, Microsoft and others form Consortium for 25/50 Gbps Ethernet Switches in Data Centers

LightReading reports on Google, Microsoft and others forming a consortium for 25/50 Gbit/s switches to increase speed and reduce cost of data center networking.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. – A consortium of companies including Arista Networks, Broadcom Corporation, Google Inc., Mellanox Technologies, Ltd., and Microsoft Corp. today announced the availability of a specification optimized to allow data center networks to run over a 25 or 50 Gigabit per second (Gbit/s) Ethernet link protocol. This new specification will enable the cost-efficient scaling of network bandwidth delivered to server and storage endpoints in next-generation cloud infrastructure, where workloads are expected to surpass the capacity of 10 or 40 Gbps Ethernet links deployed today.

The 25 Gigabit Ethernet Consortium was formed by the above leading cloud networking technology providers for the purpose of supporting an industry-standard, interoperable Ethernet specification that boosts the performance and slashes the interconnect cost per Gbps between the server Network Interface Controller (NIC) and Top-of-Rack (ToR) switch.

ZDnet says the consortium is a response to stalls in the IEEE process.

The consortium was formed after plans to create official Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) specifications stalled at a meeting last March, due to a perceived lack of support.

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The tech giants say that in essence, specifications published by the consortium "maximizes the radix and bandwidth flexibility of the data center network while leveraging many of the same fundamental technologies and behaviors already defined by the IEEE 802.3 standard."

Microsoft runs out of US IPv4 addresses in Azure, assigns non-US addresses until they run out?

Microsoft posts on how they are assigning non-US IPv4 addresses to US customers given they have run out of IPv4 addresses.

IPv4 address space has been fully assigned in the United States, meaning there is no additional IPv4 address space available. This requires Microsoft to use the IPv4 address space available to us globally for the addressing of new services. The result is that we will have to use IPv4 address space assigned to a non-US region to address services which may be in a US region.  It is not possible to transfer registration because the IP space is allocated to the registration authorities by Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.

At times your service may appear to be hosted in a non-US location.

Service and Data are located where deployed

It is important to note that the IP address registration authority does not equate to IP address physical location (i.e., you can have an IP address registered in Brazil but allocated to a device or service physically located in Virginia).  Thus when you deploy to a U.S. region, your service is still hosted in U.S. and your customer data will remain in the U.S. as detailed in our Trust Center: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/support/trust-center/privacy/

We are currently working with a few major IP geo-location database companies to update the location of these IPs which should help alleviate the issues this may be causing.

It’s too bad in this post, no mention is of IPv6 and what the longer term plan is.

Satellite dishes may come back to data centers

Remember when high availability data centers like military ones had satellite dishes.  With the growth of satellite connectivity dishes may be coming back to be part data centers.  WSJ reports on Google buying a satellite-imaging startup.

The Skybox team will initially work with Google's Maps business. Google Maps uses images from roughly 1,000 sources currently. Most of these images of the Earth are updated every few months or years. If Skybox can help Google update this information daily, it could help people respond to incidents, such as disasters, more quickly and help direct responses.

However, longer term, Skybox's technology may also help with Google's goal of spreading Internet access more widely.

"Skybox's mission is about more than just imaging," said David Cowan, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, which invested in Skybox. "Skybox is disrupting how satellites are deployed in space and that has implications for the types of global communication challenges that Google plans to address."

Cisco says it will Crush VMware

VMware caught a lot of companies flatfooted with the grow of server virtualization. VMware bought Nicira as part of virtualizing the network gear.  Cisco is trying not to make the mistake of not moving fast enough to head off VMware.

Business Insider reports on Cisco’s John Chambers goal to crush Vmware.

A cheerful John Chambers told Wall Street analysts on Wednesday that his plan to crush his biggest threat, a new technology led by VMware, is working well.

The network industry, where Cisco dominates, is at the cusp of a huge change called software-defined networking. That's where the high-end features built into expensive routers and switches are put into software that can run on cheap, commodity hardware.

The movement is being led by VMware and a startup it acquired in 2012 for $1.26 billion called Nicira. Nicra's founder more or less invented SDN.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/chambers-cisco-is-going-to-crush-vmware-2014-5#ixzz31mZnztaL