Bach Seat

Julie Bort at the BusinessInsider says Facebook is challenging the stagnate network giant Cisco (CSCO). Facebook’s (FB) Najam Ahmad, leader of the OCP networking project announced a product that should have Cisco shaking in its boots. Mr. Ahmad told the New York Times, “The bigger strategy here is to get computer networking out of the black box, black operations part of the world.”

Facebook introduced the new top-of-rack Wedge switch in 2013. The Wedge release made good FB’s promise to disrupt the $23 billion Ethernet switch market, now dominated by Cisco. Wedge is part of the Open Compute Project (OCP). The author says is OCP one of the most important tech projects Facebook has ever created. OCP began in 2012 as a radically new way to build and buy computer hardware. It creates free and “open source” designs where anyone can contribute to the designs and use them for free.

Open Compute Project

The hardware OCP designs range from computer servers to hard drives to the racks that hold them all. While Facebook still leads the project, it has grown into an industry phenom. In 2013, the article says Facebook saved “over $1 billion” by using the hardware invented by Facebook.

And a year ago, OCP announced plans to build a network switch. And not just any network switch, but one designed as a software-defined networking (SDN) device. BI explains that SDN is a new way to build networks that threaten Cisco, or at least Cisco’s 60+% profit margins. SDN takes the fancy features baked into network equipment – things like security, management – and puts them into the software. This turns the hardware into something that dumbly moves bits of information around. The hardware switch becomes easier to move around and manage, and far less expensive, all things that cloud computing does better.

Software-defined networking

Cisco has already recently released its own SDN product line Cisco Open Network Environment (ONE). Ms. Bort (and others) contend these products encourage customers to keep buying Cisco’s high-performance but expensive gear by including features that will only work with said Cisco’s products. No doubt many enterprises will want that. But Facebook’s switch is a threat for a lot of reasons.

• Facebook is already testing it in its own data centers, one of the most demanding environments around, it said.
• Wedge is “open source.” Cisco gear is somewhat like Apple’s (AAPL) gear. Cisco controls and keeps secret every part of it from the operating system to the custom processors.

The Wedge is different. Everything from the software to the choice of processor Intel (INTC), AMD (AMD), or ARM (ARMH), is “open source” meaning others can see and use or modify the design. As Facebook’s Yuval Bachar and Adam Simpkins explain in a Facebook post about the Wedge switch:

Traditional network switches often use fixed hardware configurations and non-standard control interfaces, limiting the capabilities of the device and complicating deployments. … Unlike with traditional closed-hardware switches, with “Wedge” anyone can modify or replace any of the components in our design to better meet their needs.

Standard parts

EnterpriseTech explains the Wedge switch was built using standard parts. It uses Broadcom’s (BRCM) popular Trident-II switch ASIC, which can provide sixteen 40 Gb/sec ports, which could easily be expanded to 32 ports. The ports can also be equipped with splitter cables, breaking them down into 10 Gb/sec ports that would boost the effective port count to 64 ports in a 1U enclosure. The Wedge switch has a compute element, which is a microserver based on an unspecified Intel processor (most likely an eight-core “Avoton” C2000 processor) that adheres to Facebook’s “Group Hug” microserver specification. Finally, the Wedge switch uses a Facebook homegrown version of Linux.

OCP has already attracted some big players beyond Facebook, too, including Microsoft (MSFT), Intel, Goldman Sachs, Rackspace (RAX), Bloomberg, and many others. It’s worth noting that enterprises cannot buy this switch from Facebook. They would have to order it from a custom manufacturer, just like all other OCP designs. But if this switch does well for Facebook, enterprises will be encouraged to try SDN. And up-and-coming competitors to Cisco, like Arista and Big Switch are involved in OCP and are standing by to cash in.

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Facebook is not alone. Google (GOOG) and Amazon (AMZN) have done the same thing after being frustrated by the slow pace at which incumbent tech companies move. By comparison, the Asian contractor manufacturers that Facebook has used for its open hardware have moved disarmingly quickly, according to Facebook’s Ahmad.

Is this an industry inflection point? There is a school of thought out there that believes we are. They compare today’s networking environment to the phone era when Lucent and Nortel were at their peak and failed in the face of the newfangled softswitch. The Cisco Smartnet annual fee on top of any hardware you buy from them sounds exactly like the kinds of pricing practice those who remember, saw in the voice industry when it was a duopoly of Nortel and Lucent.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.