Google Pluto Switch

Two participants of the forum Networking-forum.com network administrators found in the warehouse of their company unknown devices called Pluto with 20 ports of 10GbE and 4 ports of 1 GbE. They became interested because they had never seen such devices. The front panel had a connector of an unknown type: like SFP, but not so deep, and the inscriptions in Finnish on the rear panel. Search on the Internet gave almost nothing. It was possible only to find out that the MAC addresses on the package belong to Google as a manufacturer of the equipment. In February of this year, photos of the strange switch were first published on the forum - and the investigation began.




The authors of the photos work in the company that supplies equipment, one of their warehouses is located in the small town of Shelby, Iowa. It was there that the switches were found. By the way, 45 km from Shelby is one of the largest Google data centers - most likely, the cargo was simply delivered to the wrong address.
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"Detectives" connected the switch to the network, but at first they could not enter the console and configure the port to control the strange device. But here is what Wireshark sniffer showed:





In the end, the correct settings for the console still picked up, so that we managed to identify the device as Google Planet8541 Pluto Edge.

  CPU: 8541, Version: 1.1, (0x80720011)
 Core: E500, Version: 2.0, (0x80200020)
 Clock Configuration:
        CPU: 825 MHz, CCB: 330 MHz,
        DDR: 165 MHz (330 MT / s data rate), LBC: 41 MHz
 CPM: 330 Mhz
 L1: D-cache 32 kB enabled
        I-cache 32 kB enabled
 Board: Google Planet8541 Pluto Edge Switch
        Wildcat revision 0.4
        Hardware watchdog enabled
        Last reset: Power Up
        Reset count: 0
 DRAM: 512 MB 

At the request of the members of the forum the device was disassembled and photographed its insides. Unfortunately, the quality of the camera on the smartphone is not very good.



The mysterious device is so interested in all that there are several who want to buy the find. In the end, representatives from Google contacted Shelby employees and asked to urgently send equipment to them, promising even a reward — rare t-shirts that were not on sale.

It turned out that this switch is indeed an internal development of Google, it works on firmware from Google. Apparently, these are used in data centers. Google optimizes many components for its needs, for example, server 44U racks with 8 hard drives per unit .



Google has developed unique network protocols and interfaces, perhaps even unique cables. All this is done to maximize the cost of equipment in data centers, says Andrew Feldman, founder of SeaMicro and a former major supplier of network equipment for Google.

The authors of the original photos later contacted the owner of the forum Networking-forum.com Steve Spangl (Steve Spangle) and asked him to remove this thread with their posts, but he refused, instead wiped their names, replacing them with theirs.