If necessity is the mother of invention, then the need for cheap, efficient, compact servers and network equipment has made Facebook an innovator of gear optimized for cloud data centers and workloads. It's leadership in the development of standard, hyper scale hardware using interchangeable commodity components led to the Open Compute Project (OCP), bootstrapped by designs and hardware specifications intended for Facebook's first data center. Two years and five Open Compute Summits later, the project has over 150 members and a growing list of technical specs.
Facebook isn't stopping with custom servers and it's just pushed open source hardware disruption to a realm of data center infrastructure that once seemed untouchable by the forces of commodification: networking. By announcing a top-of-rack (ToR) switch and associated OS, code-named Wedge and FBOSS respectively, Facebook could do for network hardware what white box Intel servers with a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache , MySQL and PHP or Python) did for cloud servers.
Like other OCP projects, the plan is to break network equipment aggregating many hardware and software elements into their atomic and hence interchangeable building blocks. The switch project's lead engineers describe the goal on their blog:
We're big believers in the value of disaggregation - of breaking down traditional data center technologies into their core components so we can build new systems that are more flexible, more scalable, and more efficient.
As they elaborate, it's clear the initial results are significant:
Last year, we kicked off a new networking project within OCP, with a goal of developing designs for OS-agnostic top-of-rack (TOR) switches. This was the first step toward disaggregating the network - separating hardware from software, so we can spur the development of more choices for each - and our progress so far has exceeded our expectations: Broadcom , Intel, Mellanox, and Accton have already contributed designs for open switches; Cumulus Networks and Big Switch Networks have made software contributions; and the development work and discussions in the project group have been highly productive
The Wedge hardware design follows an OCP model of modularity, with replaceable fans, power supplies, switch circuitry and network ports, but it's key innovation is a micro server module controlling it all, what the designers cleverly call 'Group Hug.' The name is significant because it references an existing Facebook standard, meaning that when it comes to provisioning, monitoring, managing and upgrading the switch, it can be treated like any of Facebook's hundreds of thousands of servers.
As a Linux-based OS, FBOSS is inherently modular and programmable, which allows Facebook or other developers to implement, change and most importantly centrally control fundamental switch features like packet forwarding, network protocol handling and control logic, while also providing extensible APIs for monitoring and management software. It's noteworthy that many of these functions are also provided by the OpenFlow SDN protocol, however OpenFlow was conspicuously absent from Facebook's announcement which leads one to believe it's seen as unnecessary, insufficient and perhaps inherently deficient for cloud scale infrastructure. Indeed, my Twitter dialog with a veteran and well-known network engineer hints that OpenFlow's best days may already be over:
Facebook's 'Wedge' and 'FBOSS,' open, commodity switch look sweet. Interesting no mention of Open Flow. http://t.co/BQK8bc2tOd
- Kurt Marko (@krmarko) June 19, 2014
@krmarko OpenFlow is so last Tuesday. The great last hope that wasn't. Doesn't scale across use cases easily. Also, what @trumanboyes said
- Hoff (@Beaker) June 19, 2014
Potential for business disruption abounds
Anticipating wider adoption of this and similar OCP-derived networking hardware, Wall street analysts are already calculating the negative ramifications of Facebook's announcement on big network equipment vendors like Cisco, Arista and Juniper. Jeff Kvaal, a senior networking research analyst for Northland Securities is quoted saying, 'We consider this a negative for Arista in particular and the data center switching vendors [like]Cisco and Juniper Networks] in general.' He notes that Arista is a major Facebook supplier, while Juniper has seen strong growth in its switching business from hyper scale cloud services.
Yet commodity white box network hardware has been available for several years. Indeed, most recent ToR designs use the same Broadcom Trident II switch chip. Even Intel has produced a reference design, since adopted by more than one low-cost OEM, over a year ago. Yet outside of mega-cloud services like Google, Facebook and Microsoft, brimming with smart engineers able to customize and debug bare bones switches using relatively untested designs, commodity hardware has gone nowhere, particularly in enterprise IT.
Yet Facebook's design could be the tipping point for commodity, open source network equipment. Not only does it come with the imprimatur and road testing of a major cloud operator, but it is modular, programmable and thus easily customized. While Facebook has built a device for connecting thousands of servers in a hyper scale distributed system, the platform could be repurposed for other situations without a complete redesign. As the project's engineers write:
With 'Wedge' anyone can modify or replace any of the components in our design to better meet their needs. For example, you could use an ARM-based microserver rather than the Intel-based microserver we've selected. Or you could take the electronics and repackage them in a new enclosure, perhaps to solve a different set of problems outside the rack.
For example, variants of the design, with the aforementioned low-power ARM server and different network service modules could be used for UTM or other security appliances. Alternatively, using somewhat beefier server CPUs along with additional routing, voice and virtualization software, Wedge and FBOSS could be turned into a converged branch office appliance to rival recent offerings from Cisco ( ISR X-series) and Riverbed ( SteelFusion). Facebook's project could even be a gift to HP, which could incorporate a variant of the Wedge/FBOSS hardware/software stack into a Moonshot server cartridge that provides higher switching throughput than its existing switch module plus programmability to adapt to different workloads and network needs.
With cloud service providers needing to deploy, replace and manage servers and switches by the thousand, it's a situation ripe for standardization and commodification. Cheap, interchangeable x86 servers paired with cloud software stacks are the Legos of cloud data centers, but Facebook's announcement means network hardware is likely to be the next segment to succumb to the disruptive forces of commodity hardware production and open source software development.
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