Yahoo! Inc., which used to run an internally modified variation of FreeBSD, has since outsourced the job to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux team. Google, meanwhile, has been doing just the opposite — extensively customizing Linux and other open-source software for its own use, while generally refusing to contribute its work back to open-source projects. Google has also ordered custom motherboards from Intel Corp. that the search giant uses to build its own servers — a further indication of Google’s vertical integration.
Gordon Haff, senior analyst at Illuminata, has blogged about this issue for CNET and for Internet Evolution, where he wrote that Google “already intensely customizes ‘off-the-shelf’ components to its own purposes.”
This may not be the normal course of the tech marketplace, which tends to outsource even uniquely customized widgets — Apple’s iPhone, for instance, was made by 30 companies across three continents. But trends don’t determine Google’s path, as it has shown numerous times. "We're about not ever accepting that the way something has been done in the past is necessarily the best way to do it today," Douglas Merrill, Google’s director of internal technology, said in 2006 to a gathering of CIOs.
When Google realized that commercially available 10GbE (10 Gigabit Ethernet) switches couldn’t meet its high standards for power consumption and cost, it decided to make its own as part of a “secret internal initiative,” according to Andrew Schmitt of Nyquist Capital, which could have an “enormous ... disruptive impact” on the 10GbE supply chain. Schmitt had been trying to account for shipments of 10GbE components he had seen moving about the marketplace. Through his sleuthing, he tracked them to Google’s doorstep, where he discovered the search engine giant was building its own switches to interconnect servers within its datacenters. The costs related to designing and building its own switches to its specific needs were apparently less than modifying off-the-shelf alternatives. Schmitt speculated that Google based its design on Broadcom’s 20-port 10GbE switch.
Om Malik, of GigaOm, was quick to follow up on Schmitt’s Google scoop, and discovered that “these are early days for this particular core switch project.” Not only did GigaOm confirm Schmitt’s story, the widely read tech blog furthered the story by adding: "This is not the only [core switch project]” at Google, and that Fulcrum Micro may provide some competition for Broadcom in the end. Although Google has kept silent on the issue, its job page speaks for itself.
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