“J.R. Rivers is one of the arms dealers. He runs a company called Cumulus Networks that helps the giants of the web — and other outfits — buy their networking hardware directly from “original design manufacturers,” or ODMs, in China and Taiwan. And he’s worked in this world for an awfully long time. He’s one of the Google engineers who secretly designed a new breed of networking switch for the company’s data centers, the massive computing facilities that drive its search engine and the rest of its web services.”
Exclusive: Google, Amazon, and Microsoft Swarm China for Network Gear | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com (via irq)
Interesting to see this getting some ink, although rife with inaccurate statements. It’s the software on the hardware that is the hard part no one has fixed yet - and it is possible to track this market. Hard, yet, but not impossible. Everybody seems to forget the whole reason we got merchant silicon was from the consumer market. Volumes (even with Google) pale in comparison to the millions of consumer routers that ship every year.
