Facebook has unveiled a design for networking equipment dubbed 6-pack that appears to challenge networking giants like Cisco and Juniper Networks. The company has been looking at more software-based, open hardware. The Wall Street Journal reports:
Facebook, Google Inc. and other Web giants have shaken up the computer-hardware business by designing computer servers to their own specifications—bypassing the usual hardware manufacturers.
Now, Facebook is expanding its assault by introducing its own designs for the networking equipment that funnels data among its computers, and between Facebook’s computers and the Web.
Computer servers and networking equipment are two of the three core components of the behind-the-scenes data centers that power nearly everything people do on their smartphones or Web browsers. Facebook’s push to self-design more of its hardware is prodding other companies to do the same, and forcing suppliers Cisco Systems Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. to change what they do. Cisco and HP are starting to sell their computing hardware without their proprietary software that some customers complain keeps them locked into those systems.
The system, nicknamed 6-pack, will let Facebook build networks by filling large racks with a smaller switch called Wedge, introduced in June. Using its own design helped Facebook, whose social-networking website has 1.4 billion users, reduce spending on infrastructure and upgrade its capabilities without depending on outside suppliers.
The 6-pack is built to replace high-capacity spine switches that handle the bulk of traffic in a data center. Though it was originally marketed as a cheaper, top-of-rack switch, Wedge was designed to become a building block for systems to replace more expensive kinds of gear, said Najam Ahmad, Facebook’s vice president of infrastructure.
The spine switch market was worth about $2.9 billion in 2014, smaller yet more profitable than the $3.1 billion top-of-rack switch market, according to Infonetics Research, a unit of IHS Inc. In the past, Menlo Park, California-based Facebook bought its spine switches from traditional networking-gear providers like Cisco and Juniper, Ahmad said, without specifying the company’s suppliers.
