Facebook Reveals Final Piece In Scalable Data Center Vision



Facebook revealed the final piece in its scalable data redesign today, one that completes its vision of redefining traditional hardware and software to make it more flexible to meet the needs of Facebook’s scale.

To that end, they announced a new open-source modular switch platform called 6-pack.

The key piece to understand is that Facebook has focused on separating the hardware and software, making each part of the system fully programmable, thereby giving Facebook the flexibility it requires.

Facebook plans to contribute the entire design to the Open Compute project, where engineers will be free to build, configure and design these components as they see fit.

Last June, Facebook began this journey by redesigning the top of rack switch ( the so-called Wedge), and developing a version of Linux called FBoss to run it. This was the first step in separating the hardware from the software, which was key to building the more flexible network required for computing at Facebook scale.

This enabled Facebook to treat the switch like it was a programmable server because it had its own operating system and could operate independently. This was essential because they needed to separate the hardware and software from the network as a whole and allow engineers to deal with each piece as a separate programmable entity.

But they couldn’t stop there. As they built the data center of the future, they also needed to completely rethink network topology, and how information moves in the network. This required creating an entirely new data center fabric that was flexible enough to deal with Facebook’s massive computing requirements without getting bogged down.

As Frederic Lardinois wrote of the new Altoona data center last fall, “With Facebook’s new approach, however, the entire data center runs on a single high-performance network. There are no [traditional] clusters, just server pods that are all connected to each other.”

This led to the final requirement: how to deal with modular switches that weren’t situated at the top of the rack, but within the fabric itself. Today’s announcement solves that final problem by introducing a monster fully open modular switch based on Wedge, that like the top of rack switch, has separated the hardware and software from the network, and given Facebook total flexibility on how to program and run it.

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