Google's Dark Fibre

Don Dodge on Google's dark fibre connections

"Google has been quietly buying up huge amounts of dark fiber to connect all of their distributed data centers. This plan will take years to unfold, but all the pieces are falling into place.

Dark fiber is a term used to describe unused fiber optic cable in the communications infrastructure. It is "dark" because it is "unlit" by usage.

So, why has Google been buying up lots of dark fiber?

Google hired a pair of very bright industrial designers to figure out how to cram the greatest number of CPUs, the most storage, memory and power support ind power support into a 20- or 40-foot box. We're talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig. The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid.

Two years ago Google had one data center. Today they are reported to have 64. Two years from now, they will have 300-plus. The advantage to having so many data centers goes beyond simple redundancy and fault tolerance. They get Google closer to users, reducing latency. They offer inter-datacenter communication and load-balancing using that no-longer-dark fiber Google owns. But most especially, they offer super-high bandwidth connections at all peering ISPs at little or no incremental cost to Google.

Where some other outfit might put a router, Google is putting an entire data center, and the results are profound."

It can also server as the carrier for certain bandwidth-heavy or security-intensive products that should not run on the public Internet (instead, you'd only have to reach the edge of Google's private "Internet")."

See also:
Google's Own Private Internet