Right, because we can differentiate traffic. In other words, we are very careful to make sure that, in the face of catastrophe, the traffic that is impacted is the relatively less important traffic.

Is control of the network completely removed from the routing hardware and shifted to servers?

You used an interesting word -- completely. There's going to be some vestiges of control left back on the main device, but maybe for simplicity's sake let's say it's completely removed. We've shifted it from running on an embedded processor in individual switches -- and that embedded processor is usually two or three generations old; if you open up a brand new switch today it wouldn't surprise me if you found an 8-year-old Power PC processor -- to a , which could be the latest generation, multicore processor, etc. So getting 10X performance improvements is easy and even more than that isn't hard.

I understand you built your own gear for this network?

We built our own networking gear because when we started the project two years ago there was no gear that could support OpenFlow.