
Inside Facebook's plan to eat another $350B IT market - elsewhen
http://www.businessinsider.com/inside-facebooks-telecom-infrastructure-project-2017-5
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res0nat0r
Amazon's already done this and replaced expensive Cisco Nexus routers with
their home grown in house creations. Big hardware networking equipment vendors
are going to continue to see this type of encroachment from large IT companies
IMO.

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aibottle
If I recall correctly Google built its own network gear long time ago.
Completely makes sense. Looking at Cisco product with regard to security & the
recent NSA leaks you really don't want your network gear from them.

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holydude
What makes you think they can do it better in terms of security? In my opinion
it is a matter of costs and trying to solve a specific problem.

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astrodust
Google can better control their designs and supply chain than Cisco.

Cisco's priorities are more directly profits. Google's are often more security
related, though they can profit from being more secure.

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SCHiM
They can better control their supply chain maybe, but still not good enough
if/when they're up against state sponsored espionage.

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mlangdon
The big difference here is that states can simply buy access to, e.g., a Cisco
Nexus and attack it from inside and out until they find a vulnerability in NX-
OS, let's say, a malformed CLI-via-HTTP call.

Whereas, what software does a Google switch even run? What's the architecture,
the APIs? You basically need someone inside Google, or for one of these things
to fall off a truck. Way more involved and expensive than the 10k you might
spend on a Nexus to throw it your lab and set your hackers on it.

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stargrazer
Actually, Google has published papers and have presented talks (many of which
are available on Youtube) on the type of gear they have developed. I don't
know what their latest versions are, but recently they were using OpenFlow
style infrastructure to provided fine-grained control (security, balancing,
analysis) over flows through out their network. OpenFlow style constructs also
provide a micro-segmentation style control (ie distributed firewall) over
ingress/egress of traffic at the individual container/vm port level.

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astrodust
This is what RIM/Blackberry should have done when they were the most trusted
name in telecom. They could've bought Nortel and made a juggernaut.

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pedalpete
Does this not also somewhat mean this is what Nortel should have done? What
did RIM bring to the table that Nortel didn't have, or was this related to the
timing, where Nortel was already in the gutter and RIM was still flying high?

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astrodust
Timing related. Nortel over-extended themselves in the 1990s by making a bunch
of acquisitions related to networking. RIM could've bailed them out or
acquired the company outright since they were very strong financially until
just after 2008.

Remember, when the iPhone launched RIM was at their peak strength and Nortel
was a forgotten husk.

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dkarapetyan
Has OCP been really that successful? How many data centers are actually using
their design?

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stargrazer
Facebook was the one who started the OCP (Open Compute Platform) concept.
Quite a number of companies have climbed on board. And there is a yearly
conference in the March time frame in where quite a number of companies get
together and show hardware based upon the open standards and concepts
developed through OCP.

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perlpimp
this is essentially an apache model or how it came to be. some of internet
providers created and funded apache foundation to make a decent webserver that
was flexible and reasonably fast, in terms of how fast a C based webserver can
be.

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mediocrejoker
I'm not too familiar with the design of apache but I believe nginx is also
written in C. I'm curious about your comment because generally C is regarded
as being the wrong choice for any given project for several reasons but speed
is not one of them.

Are there other languages that are enabling faster web servers?

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ianai
Actually what's stopping switch and router configuration from being something
a local shop does for other local shops? At this point both the software and
hardware aspects appear to be generic enough to be do-able. It also buys a
local company really good local service. (Or,at least the potential for it.)

My thinking is if many companies can do it internally above a large enough
scale then it may be a service opportunity for smaller entities.

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kuschku
> Plus, German telecom equipment maker ADVA Optical Networking is
> manufacturing the device and, as of a few weeks ago had nine customers
> trying it out for their telecom needs, a mix of big telecom companies and
> enterprises, it said.

That actually sounds a lot better, as it means Facebook isn’t actually
manufacturing it, and it’s harder for a security agency to inject into it
(although there will obviously still be spies)

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wmf
What are you saying, that security agencies can infiltrate Facebook but not
ADVA's supply chain?

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kuschku
I'm saying that it's easier to infiltrate something that isn't 6000km away.

