Social network giant Facebook has revealed that they are currently hard at work on a couple of open networking projects, which have been given the name Wedge and FBOSS, respectively. Why the work on Wedge and FBOSS? Well, Facebook intends for both open networking projects to result in additional efficient and low-cost computing systems. First of all, Wedge is a top-of-rack switch, while FBOSS happens to be a Linux-based operating system.
Both of these were announced to be part of Facebook’s Open Compute Project (OCP). Facebook’s vice president of network engineering, Najam Ahmad, shared, “What we’ve done is taken tech on the server side and put it in the switch. We’re changing all the control and management infrastructure out to a more standard open source-based model.”
Wedge will find its way into an OPC-designed Group Hug server board in the switch, allowing Facebook to run its Linux-based networking operating system on a server which is located beside a standard issue Trident networking silicon.
Facebook stated, “Wedge and FBOSS depart from current networking design paradigms to leverage our experience in operating hundreds of thousands of servers in our data centres. In other words, our goal with these projects was to make our network look, feel, and operate more like the OCP servers we’ve already deployed, both in terms of hardware and software.”
Eventually, after the initial testing period, Facebook will propose such designs to the wider Open Compute Project community in order to help boost the speed of innovation where the networking hardware space is concerned. One thing’s for sure, Facebook seems to be handling a whole lot of testing recently, including in Africa.
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