Regardless of what people think of facebook and their business, this is a pretty big deal. As a very large tech company, they have the time and talent to develop their own switches. If they are releasing the reference implementations, unlike google, this helps anyone else trying to build the next big web company. The more information the merrier.
Yes, but only because they lag behind Google in this regard. Companies embrace and propose open standards in the areas they don't dominate. As soon as you hit a core competitive advantage, they get as closed as possible.
It's not because they don't "dominate" in the area of building network hardware that they release their designs. It's because this is not what gives Facebook an advantage in the social products space.
There aren't better social networks out there that would thrive if only they had better network switches.
I'm not so sure of this. Google has published multiple documents [1] mentioning the limitation of top-of-rack switching capacity and data center bisection bandwidth: how they need to design around it, and why it makes sense to use commodity switches despite the burden on software design.
I didn't read it to see what you were referring to, but that's the second edition of an older book, so maybe they didn't update everything for the new edition. Google has been banging the software-defined networking drum for a while now (configuration is part of the compute engine APIs now, for instance[1]).
I work in a somewhat related team (Traffic/CDN) at Facebook, and I'm very excited about what this is going to allow us to do in future.
Current switches just don't support the deployment, monitoring, and configuration power we have for servers. While we've done a lot (probably close to the most than can be) to bring them somewhat close to par, Wedge should not only leapfrog to equality, but also use the same infrastructure - and gain whenever the server processes improve.
The opportunities opened by being able to quickly canary some new features (without doing a firmware upgrade before turning on and again after turning it off), have detailed logging and monitoring and reusing our existing tools for correlation and comparison, and to do some things we currently are forced to do on separate machines now are fairly large.
This isn't my area, so I don't know what we've previously disclosed or what agreements we might have in place with vendors about, say, not mentioning them, so I don't feel comfortable disclosing that.
If it was anything like experiences in other cases, my suspicion (as I said, not my area) is that switch vendors have relatively few customers like us (certainly few that discover bugs, change configuration, upgrade firmware nearly as often as we do, or who make use of the particular set of features we do at the same time), and so some things we really would want would not really be in their interest to work on relative to things that would be useful to most of their customers.
At some point it probably became worth trying something new like Wedge/FBOSS (which while technically hard at least can build on our experience building hardware and software for servers) in the hopes of improved turn-around time and getting the features we want further down the line.
I'll try remember to track down someone from the team to give a less vague answer after lunch.
I really wish one of the big hardware vendors would just start shipping validated, certified and warrantied Open Compute Project hardware at the substantial savings that can be had from it. Or maybe I'm ignorant here and there are little savings to be had.
The rest of this post is just a rant from my perspective in the SMB space.
In my space, everything that's worth getting is too expensive, and everything else is crap. The switch and storage market is a racket, as near as I can tell, where every opportunity to get you to pay another 20 or 30 percent premium over what you had before is taken with selling you features you don't want or can't use. Software defined storage is, ultimately, limited by your network. Software defined networking is here (OpenFlow, network virtualization) but SDN is being used as a value-add to get customers to pay even more. The result is that software designed storage is a crapshoot (only as high quality as the network) and whether or not you save money is debateable.
Shared storage is a tremendous racket because adding "SAS" to anything doubles or triples its price. Consumer SSDs are advancing the state of the art much faster than enterprise tech (which tends to accommodate slower purchasing cycles and longer service lifetimes), but to get an older, slower SSD for a shared SAS JBOD means paying five or six times as much per gigabyte.
I really want a virtual SAN that doesn't suck, and a network that doesn't cost $1000 dollars per port to connect a handful of servers. Alas, it doesn't look like anything like that is coming soon.
In theory you just need an interposer to use SATA drives in a SAS enclosure: http://www.dataonstorage.com/dataon-products/6g-sas-to-sata-... But that still doesn't solve the problem of the JBOD itself costing more than the disks (less so with SSD) or ZFS costing more than hardware RAID, etc.
I'll start with what I know firsthand: those interposers are not supported for many technologies, including Windows Server Clustered Storage Spaces. This is straight from DataOn storage reps.
And what I know second-hand: many SATA SSDs have terrible failure modes in the form of RESET storms when behind an interposer. That is, you can end up in a situation where you have to shut down all hosts attached to the SSDs and power them off before they return to life. Not a good situation. The interposers apparently greatly exacerbate this problem.
I will check out your link on networking, thank you :)
It's somewhat hilarious that providers like Cisco are working so hard on nonsense like the Internet of Things™ while ignoring the work that will actually define the future of networking (and should have been done a decade ago)
I am so excited about this, while I realize switches are perhaps one of the last bastions of over priced software I would love to have a switch where it is just a freakin' switch. It isn't trying to be all things to all people at some level and doing that badly. I've got Blade, HP, Cisco, Supermicro, and Mellanox switches that have been in this role (Top of Rack) and so often they bite the big one when it comes to some random protocol going nuts. Every single site outage in nearly 4 years of 'launch' has been due to a switch bug.
They go on to define their terms: "breaking down traditional data center technologies into their core components" -- very little to do with what we think of as "data aggregation."
So, I wouldn't exactly call it ironic. More... homophonic? Homophonically ironic?
The full sentence is even better. "We’re big believers in the value of disaggregation – of breaking down traditional data center technologies into their core components so we can build new systems that are more flexible, more scalable, and more efficient" (at aggregating user data).
First of all, I don't know if FB is really the biggest data aggregator. Even if it was, what does data aggregation have to do with aggregation within the data center? Maybe you dislike Facebook the app or "the business model" or whatever, and that prevents you from thinking straight about the implications of this announcement.
