These big switch boxes typically end up being about thermal management and this box looks like thermal design was an afterthought. Also I'm not sure the power entry design is really all that smart. Generally speaking if you're in the market for a 640Gb/s switch (or 3.8Tb/s switch), does your data center really not have access to 48V power? The AC/DC conversion wastes power and space.<p>The QSFP's are "spaced for optimal airflow." However this spacing seems to neglect cooling the QSFPs themselves. Belly-to-belly mounting of modules is usually the most thermally challenging way to arrange them. The heat dissipated by the QSFP's is generally directed towards the top of the module. By placing open air channels between modules, they have effectively ensured that little to no air flows over the QSFP heat sinks (which is not shown). So there is probably a limitation on which reach codes are supported. My guess is that because of the thermal limitations of this design, it's not truly non-blocking in all reach configurations.
I very much want to transition to open hardware models for networking gear - for both my own home use and for rsync.net.<p>However, at no single site (especially my home) do I need a 6U chassis full of switch ports.<p>Is there a 1U version of this on the horizon ?
This is rather cool, and I'm glad to see some work being done in the networking gear space utilizing open designs and firmware like this. Unfortunately, unless I find myself needing to network a datacenter in the near future, it's not immediately useful to me.<p>That said, I do hope other developments in network gear that will be useful in other markets emerge from this effort.<p>From my perspective, there's a gap in network gear between the unmanaged, low port-count switches in plastic enclosures, targeted to home and small office consumers, and the lower tiers of Cisco's catalog, targeted toward top-of-rack or wiring-closet-of-a-larger-building type uses. I would love to see a managed switch with say, 8-24 ports, supporting features such 802.11Q VLANs. I would love to be able segment my network at home so different devices with different performance and security needs aren't all stepping on each other's toes. And I'd like the firmware and hardware designs to be open source, so it can readily patched when bugs are found, and easily adapted to new use cases.<p>I realize that I'm an outlier and that my needs are not common, or there'd probably be equipment on the market that met them. But it is my hope that as a result of Facebook's work here, and similar efforts, that building such a device will become feasible.
Wow. That switching fabric is so much smaller than the HIPPI crossbar backplanes we used in the 100baseT/pre-GigE switches that I used to write firmware for... almost 20 years ago now. Of course, complexity means higher cost, so it's obvious why nobody bought our stuff. Hopefully, this open hardware project will have better luck!<p>/* it's easy to forget just how many iterations of Moore's Law have happened since the mid-90s */
I get the feeling this is a bit like Bugatti building the Veyron, its super cool and impressive but the vast majority of us will never be able to or have a need to drive it.<p>It is still fun watch this switch go around the proverbial track, but I'm happy knowing that I'll never have to configure, build and test a switch of this complexity unless I really absolutely have to, with my largest caveat being AWS disappearing from the face of the earth.
I just want a fully open source switch that's ready for enterprise, from the h/w to s/w. Linux preferred but bsd based is acceptable.<p>I've been a "cisco guy" since 2001 or so, but I am so tired of them. Licensing fees kill budgets that could be used on other things, and you end up surrounded by <i>consultants</i> that only ever touch Lozedoze systems insisting that "nobody ever got fired for buying Cisco". Smartnet is a must for some equipment, yes, but I'm so ready for a paradigm shift in networking.<p>I've really been watching ubiquiti and their switching/routing products, they seem very promising but not quite prod ready. I am impressed with Dells open switches too.<p>Edit: The Microtik stuff being linked elsewhere here is looking pretty awesome too. Not quite FOSS but still.
So this is very interesting.<p>As someone who runs a 6509 (almost fully populated with line cards and specialized controllers) as my HOME core switch (with a second one on the way for full redundancy), an open modular switch is very cool.<p>(I'm currently hacking on OpenFlow -> NETCONF bridging, to bring typical SDN capabilities to legacy Cisco environments). Hence my rather..... extensive home network.<p>This is very similar to what Cisco is doing with Nexus and the "fabric extender" TOR replacement kit. I'll have to see if Facebook has any of this stuff in GIT and stand it up in a VM environment and play with it (I already do a bunch of OpenFlow stuff on OpenWRT and am looking at implementing an open southbound API on FPGA on the parallela board).
I was expecting a link to something like this, but more advanced<p><a href="http://opencores.org/project,mac_layer_switch" rel="nofollow">http://opencores.org/project,mac_layer_switch</a><p>and some links to digilent dev boards for hardware, however the linked project is a bit more ambitious, all full of custom ASICs and such.<p>An open source switch made out of COTS FPGA dev boards would be interesting. So you'd use something like<p><a href="http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Detail.cfm?NavPath=2,400,1228&Prod=NETFPGA-1G-CML" rel="nofollow">http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Detail.cfm?NavPath=2,400...</a><p>But what to use as a COTS "just unpack it all, plug it all together, upload the firmware and go" backplane?
Isn't this just wrapping for the COTS switching ASICs or am I missing something big?<p>Almost all "open" projects seem to hit a point where the line between open and closed is quite arbitrary, even if they choose not to see it that way.
This looks great. They also have the advantage that James Hamilton mentioned AMZ got from building their own hardware - the get to do a cleansheet s/w design and not have to support all the gazillion options that Cisco does.<p>The talk was on HN a little while ago, worth watching:
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIQETrFC_SQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIQETrFC_SQ</a><p>The scale at FB means they're probably saving hundreds of millions doing this.
Am I the only one who read the title and thought it referred to a 'pushbutton' style electronics hardware switch? I would have been quite excited to see that!