Microsoft, Google form Ethernet consortium for datacenter networks
Summary: Microsoft, Google and other firms have come together to form the 25 Gigabit Ethernet Consortium with the aim of improving cloud datacenter networks. — Charlie Osborne — Five tech giants, including Google and Microsoft …
Context & Ripple Effects
The consortium formalizes something the big cloud operators were already doing quietly: back in April 2012, Wired reported Google, Amazon and Microsoft swarming China for custom network gear, buying and building infrastructure outside the traditional enterprise vendor channel. A 25 Gigabit Ethernet specification co-authored by Microsoft and Google extends that playbook from procurement to standard-setting — instead of waiting for the incumbent Ethernet roadmap to reach the densities their datacenters need, the buyers are writing the spec themselves.
The pickup was unusually broad for a standards announcement — The Register, eWeek, Data Center Knowledge, TechSpot and Inquirer all ran it on the day — which reflects how directly it hits every equipment maker selling into cloud builds. It also fits a pattern: the same week, Microsoft separately joined the AllSeen Alliance around the AllJoyn connected-device standard, its second consortium commitment in days.
First-order effects
- Microsoft and Google gain a public specification tuned to cloud datacenter fabrics rather than enterprise LAN speeds, letting their server and switch suppliers design against a single 25G target they helped define.
- Network equipment vendors serving the cloud market now have a concrete next-generation speed point to engineer toward — or risk being bypassed if the founders' own supply chains move first.
Second-order effects
- Other large cloud operators face a fork: adopt the consortium's 25G path or fund a competing roadmap, since a standard set by two of the biggest buyers tends to become the default their suppliers build to.
- The 40 Gigabit Ethernet upgrade path loses momentum as an intermediate step, pressuring switch and optics vendors whose product plans assumed customers would march through it.
Third-order effects
- If hyperscale buyers keep writing their own interconnect specs, the center of gravity in datacenter networking shifts from vendor-led standards bodies toward ad hoc buyer coalitions — a structural change in who defines server and network hardware.
The trend: Cloud operators are moving from customizing commodity network hardware to authoring the standards themselves, using consortia to lock their scale advantages into the industry's technical baseline.