Video @Scale, "Introducing 6-pack, the First Open Hardware Modular Switch"

I really should have found and watched this video earlier!

This video is presented by Yuval Bachar, the same person posted this announcement on the Facebook Blog.

Here are some quick notes I took after watching this video.


My quick notes of this video

Wedge only provides 16 40G ports instead of 32 ports the chip can support. This is to make Wedge a building block of "6-pack".

6-pack is equal to 12 Wedges stacked together. (I noticed this point from my earlier post).

Agility: 3 months for building Wedge, and 4.5 months for "6-pack".

We (Facebook) wrote all the BGPs.

Everything is on Linux.

6-pack is 100Gbps ready when silicons are stabilized.

6-pack is switching-ASIC agnostic.

In 6-pack, no special buses. Everything is Ethernet (internally).

With 6-pack, every element (line cards, fabric cards) is a server. We (Facebook) can add new features on these "servers" very quick.

At 13:29, we can see the photo of the back side of 6-pack.

Every element of 6-pack controls its own 1+1 cooling fans.

Gigabit Ethernet is used as IPC (Inter-Process Communication?) among the elements of a 6-pack.

It can grow to higher radix version when needed, such as 12-pack or 24-pack.

Our (Facebook) goal is to share our knowledge to the world to enable people to build better data center.

Facebook is not going to sell it. We cannot order "6-pack" from Facebook.


One more thing...

A fabric card of 6-pack is equivalent to two 32-internal-port-only Wedges bounded together. Two fabric cards are equal to 4 Wedges. Therefore, a single 6-pack is equal to 8+4=12 Wedges stacked together.

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

In my earlier post, I used Cisco's Nexus 9332PQ box as an example of individual switching element instead of Wedge. The only reason I picked Cisco's box is: 9332PQ is another 32x40Gbps non-blocking full line rate Layer 3 switch just like Wedge.