By Cade Metz
Photos of the mystery computing device appeared on the web in late February. Taken with a smartphone, they were a bit washed out and a little blurry in places, but you could easily read the name printed on the long, thin piece of hardware. “Pluto Switch,” the label said.
Google declined to comment on the switch. But according to J.R. Rivers — an ex-Google engineer who helped design Google’s first networking switches in 2005 — the Pluto Switch seems to run Google software, and it uses hardware you don’t typically find on standard networking switches. Though he has no way of knowing whether it was designed by Google itself, he says it bears all the signs of gear that was custom built for a massive online operation.
A closeup of the “Pluto Switch,” a mystery hardware device that landed on the edge of Iowa this past winter. Images: networking-forum.com
Photos of the mystery computing device appeared on the web in late February. Taken with a smartphone, they were a bit washed out and a little blurry in places, but you could easily read the name printed on the long, thin piece of hardware. “Pluto Switch,” the label said.
The images were posted by two men who said the device had unexpectedly turned up at a branch office in the tiny farmland town of Shelby, Iowa — population: 641 — and they were hoping someone could tell them what it was.
Clearly, these two men were familiar with the ins and outs of computer networking, and clearly, this was a networking switch, a way of shuttling data between machines. But they’d never heard of the Pluto Switch, and it was littered with networking ports they’d never seen before. “Any ideas?” they asked. “The writing on the back is Finnish.”
According to posts they made to an obscure web discussion forum dedicated to networking hardware — networking-forum.com — they couldn’t actually get the thing to work. But they turned up a few clues indicating who the device belonged to, and eventually, after putting two and two together, they said they’d located the owner and sent the switch back.
Google calls itself one of the world’s largest hardware makers. For the past 10 years, the web giant has designed much of the gear driving the massive data centers that underpin its web empire, but it treats the particulars of this hardware operation as the most important of trade secrets. That’s why the Pluto Switch is so intriguing.
It belonged, they said, to Google.
At first, Google didn’t respond to their phone calls, the men said, and when it did, it wouldn’t explain the switch. But apparently, the company offered a reward for its return. “Finally got a hold of a Google network engineer, so the switches are heading home. He wouldn’t tell me what the connector type was so that’s still a mystery,” one of the men told the forum. “The engineer was cool and is going to send us some shirts the public can’t buy.”
The mystery switch may provide a small window into the networking hardware that drives the Googlenet — and indicate where the rest of the web is going. In recent years, Google’s efforts to redesign data center hardware have nudged other web giants in a similar direction, with Amazon, Facebook, and even Microsoft exploring custom-built data center gear. When a web empire reaches a certain size, you see, it needs gear that’s much cheaper and more efficient than the hardware typically offered by big-name sellers such as Cisco, HP, and Dell.
“I’d venture to bet that this is home-grown data center gear,” he told Wired, after reviewing the photos.
Certainly, all signs point to Google, and at the very least, the photos highlight why Google has gone to such great lengths to build its own data center hardware. According to Rivers, the switch is a significantly streamlined version of what you might buy on the open market. “The big difference,” he says, “is that this switch has forgone the standard physical layer for something less expensive.” Even those mystery networking ports are a way of cutting costs.
A glimpse of the network traffic generated by the Pluto Switch, thanks to an analysis tool called Wireshark
Pluto Lands In Shelby
The two men who posted the photos said they worked for a company that’s headquartered in Wisconsin but runs a distribution center in Shelby, Iowa, about 30 miles from a data center Google operates in another Iowa town called Council Bluffs. Apparently, the switches were delivered to the distribution center in late December or January, several weeks before the photos were posted.
“My guess is the carrier unloaded them by mistake,” said one of the two men, who seemed to be computer gurus working at the company’s HQ. “About a month later, they were shipped up to me at the corporate offices in Wisconsin. We’ve been trying to figure out what they were for the last few weeks.”
When they posted the first photo, they already had one pretty good clue on their hands. A vendor code used by the switch, they said, was registered to Google. But they didn’t seem to realize that Google designed its own switches. Eventually, others on the forum pointed them in the right direction, and the clues kept coming.
At one point, someone else on the forum offered to buy the switches. But then he had second thoughts. “It’s very likely that these really are Google’s and I’m sure they want them back,” he said. “Apple’s lost then sold iPhone ordeal with Gizmodo comes to mind.”
The men who posted the photos may work for a company called Menard’s, a retail outfit headquartered in Eau Claire, Wisconsin that runs a distribution center in Shelby. But an employee at the distribution center said that Menard’s was not the company in question, and we were unable to reach the CIO’s office in Wisconsin. A company spokesperson did not provide answers to our questions.
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At first, the two men couldn’t get into the switch “console,” the interface that would provide more info about the device. It pumped out nothing but gibberish. But when they finally got it working, others on the forum were confident the mystery was solved. The console identified the hardware board inside the device as a “Google Planet8541 Pluto Edge Switch.”
The identity of the two men has now been scrubbed from the forum. According to Steve Spangle, the owner of networking-forum.com, they requested anonymity after talking to Google. “[They] asked me to delete the thread,” Spangle tells Wired. “They said that the switches had been returned to Google and that Google had asked them to attempt to remove the thread. Instead, I scrubbed their usernames from all posts, replacing them with myself as the post author.”
Spangle says that he has not been directly contacted by Google about the posts, but that he would remove the thread if Google asked him.
As we published this story, the photos, a data dump from the console, and other information about the switch were still available on the forum. All this provides a rather detailed picture of the Pluto Switch. And it may point to much more.
Source: Wired 1
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