Facebook Makes More Announcements At OCP Summit

Today at the Open Compute Project Summit Facebook made several announcements, from its new NVMe JBOF to its renewed focus on front-end server performance. Facebook is opening up its designs for its modular switch platform, 6-pack, and its next-generation TOR switch, Wedge 100. These two networking solutions are an important step for Facebook as it aims to support 100G connectivity throughout its data centers. They are also announcing that their OpenBMC software will now support storage.

Today at the Open Compute Project Summit Facebook made several announcements, from its new NVMe JBOF to its renewed focus on front-end server performance. Facebook is opening up its designs for its modular switch platform, 6-pack, and its next-generation TOR switch, Wedge 100. These two networking solutions are an important step for Facebook as it aims to support 100G connectivity throughout its data centers. They are also announcing that their OpenBMC software will now support storage.

Last year Facebook introduced its Wedge its OS-agnostic top-of-rack switch. Facebook contributed Wedge to OCP and it was accepted as an OCP switch, with 1000’s being deployed since. Now they have released Wedge 100 a 32x100G TOR switch. Last month Facebook introduced the first open hardware modular switch, 6-pack. According to the company 6-pack is effectively 12 of its Wedge 40 switches in a physical enclosure. Facebook is submitting a detailed bill-of-materials, schematics, CAD, Gerber, and mechanic files to OCP to help manufacturers produce these new switches. Facebook is sharing these designs and testing in the hopes that it will help bring change to the networking industry and to continue to broaden the networking ecosystem.

At the OCP Summit last year Facebook also introduced OpenBMC a low-level board management software that enables flexibility and speed in feature development for BMC chips. Both of the above switches are powered by OpenBMC. Today OpenBMC will also be powering the new NVMe JBOF, Lightning.

Features include:

• ‘fscd’, a daemon to control the fans that is based on OCP FSC (Fan Speed Control). It supports both linear and nonlinear fsc tables provided by the user.
• ‘log-util’, which captures all the event/error logs from the slave devices (sensors, SSDs, PCIe switch, etc.) connected to the Lightning BMC.
• ‘flash-util’, which reads the SSDs sideband status information (like temperature, error count, etc.) based on the NVMe Management Interface standard (NVMe-MI), can reset the PCIe switch, and can update its firmware and configuration over I2C.

Engineering at Facebook

Open Compute Project

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