Facebook yesterday launched a new product which may force traditional switch vendors to take stock of the increasing trend of do-it-yourself hardware design.
Dubbed ‘6-pack’, the open hardware modular switch platform was launched by Facebook at its Networking@Scale event. The 6-pack is a chassis and fabric for the Wedge switches Facebook deployed on its data centres last year.
The reason for this product? In its reasoning, Facebook took a subtle swipe at traditional networking vendors by stating:
"As Facebook’s infrastructure has scaled, we’ve frequently run up against the limits of traditional networking technologies, which tend to be too closed, too monolithic, and too iterative for the scale at which we operate and the pace at which we move."
The 6-pack platform is the core of Facebook’s new fabric, and it uses "Wedge" as its basic building block. It is a full mesh non-blocking two-stage switch that includes 12 independent switching elements. Each independent element can switch 1.28Tbps.
There are two configurations available: One configuration exposes 16x40GE ports to the front and 640G (16x40GE) to the back, and the other is used for aggregation and exposes all 1.28T to the back.
Each element runs its own operating system on the local server and is completely independent, from the switching aspects to the low-level board control and cooling system. This means we can modify any part of the system with no system-level impact, software or hardware.
6-pack is already in production testing, with plans to contribute its design to the Open Compute Project.
