[SafdarIqbal]

These kinds of herculean efforts do make sense at Google's scale (at least from my reading of their papers & blog posts), but are there advantages for data centers operating at smaller scales to adopt some of the approaches used here e.g. custom-built commodity hardware-based network switches, SDN-based central controllers etc.?

EDIT: Maybe a better question is, at what point do you think about eschewing the traditional Cisco/Juniper gear and look towards these techniques?

[sangnoir]

> Maybe a better question is, at what point do you think about eschewing the traditional Cisco/Juniper gear and look towards these techniques?

Answer 1: when it's cheaper.

Answer 2: when traditional gear gets in the way.

My guess is it's mostly 1 and rarely 2 for most organizations. Might be a combination of both.

[eitally]

The trap ... which ironically only affects bleeding edge corporations ... is that it's usually cheaper superficially, but doing anything novel in the infrastructure space leads to enormous issues of supportability downstream. For all the complaints programmers have about noobs not knowing anything, or training new hires on company coding standards & practices, it's FAR worse on the infrastructure side.

I'd argue that traditional gear gets in the way a lot more than most people know / would think, but because you can pull any John Q Public off the street to support a Cisco or Juniper environment, "no one was ever fired for buying IBM" applies. Even investments in the common non-core networking gear is usually limited to just a handful of vendors so diversity isn't really a problem in most cases.