Two quick observations of Facebook’s announcement of “6-pack” open hardware modular switch

Facebook announced an introduction to its "6-pack" open hardware module switch 20 hours ago. Here are my two quick observations of "6-pack".

This is the first time I can see the photos of Facebook’s switch hardware.

Photo of "6-pack". Copied from Facebook's original post.

In previous announcement, Facebook did not publish photos its Wedge switch. This time, some photos of “6-pack” and Wedge card are also published.

It looks to me this hardware is not just an engineering sample, but a mass-produced box. I am starting to believe maybe Facebook has serious plans to “sell” such boxes to the market.


One ‘6-pack’ is equivalent to 12 Cisco Nexus 9332PQ switches stacked together.

If this is a totally open hardware platform, then the traffic among “line cards” and “fabric cards” should be only in open format, such as normal IP packets inside Ethernet frames. That is to say, every “line cards” (LC) and “fabric cards” are indeed independent Layer 3 switches.

If I replace each of the LCs and Fabrics in the following diagram copied from the announcement with Cisco’s Nexus 9332PQ switch, they should be equivalent to each other.

 High-level “6-pack” block diagram and the internal network data path topology.
Copied from Facebook's original post.

Cisco Nexus 9332PQ Switch. Photo copied from Cisco.com.

Reference:
Introducing “6-pack”: the first open hardware modular switch | Engineering Blog | Facebook Code