back to article Facebook, Cumulus take on Cisco with 128 ports of open networking iron

Facebook has pulled apart a bunch of its Wedge 100 Gbps switches and reassembled them as a hefty 128-port 100 Gbps open network switch dubbed "Backpack." The Backpack switch was announced at this week's Disaggregate Networking event. It runs Facebook's FBOSS networking and OpenBMC baseboard management implementations, and The …

  1. Blotto Silver badge
    Paris Hilton

    Silly comment

    does it still work if your company blocks facebook?

  2. Alistair
    Windows

    While that is one *hell* of a lot of network bandwidth, given that its a DC switch, calling it Backpack, well, I somehow doubt Dora will be pulling that out any time soon.

    p.s. Love the idea, just think they could have named it a heck of a lot better. Now, to con a VP into buying four of them.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Explain to me just what is new here?.....Oh, that's right....nothing, it's just OEM tin designed by ex-Cisco engineers running an OS developed by ex-Cisco engineers.

  4. thomn8r

    My question is why does facebook feel the need to play in this space? All it takes if for the Zuck to get distracted by a squirrel and now you have orphaned hardware

    1. Ian Michael Gumby
      Big Brother

      @Thomn8r ...

      Facebook like Google require a set of massive clusters to run their business. We're talking tens of thousands of machines across multiple data centers and they require massive amounts of bandwidth between them.

      To Facebook the tech is a commodity so that they are not harmed by open sourcing both hardware and software. They have to open source this precisely so that they do not have orphaned hardware.

      FB has no advantage by keeping their investment to themselves and also by open sourcing they share the risk and the costs of the tech with others.

  5. Networking Dude

    Just at CLOS in a Box

    All this is is a bunch of 1RU boxes put into a CLOS fabric. Instead of cables to connect them they use wire traces. Where is the buffering stats on these 128 ports of 100 Gig? Might be great for Facebook but there are many other considerations for a box of this size and throughtput and buffers are a big one...

    1. Jon Massey

      Re: Just at CLOS in a Box

      Clos, not CLOS. It's a bloke's name, not an acronym.

  6. cryptarium

    Other options...

    I would love to see this same architecture capable of doing L2-L7. Think of it as competition with Gigamon and legacy switch vendors all at the same time. That could help really disrupt the run of the mill stuff while stepping into bigger arenas. I would also have a smaller, more scalable version of the switch.

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