At this week’s OCP Summit in San Jose, Facebook released details on how they’re rethinking the fabric of their data centers. FBOSS is still used to bind together its data center, but there are significant changes to ensure that a single code image and the same overall systems can support multiple generations of data center topologies and an increasing number of hardware platforms.
Facebook’s next-generation “F16” data center fabric design offers 4x the capacity of its predecessor while promising to be more scalable and simpler to operate and evolve. The fabric leverages commercially available 100G CWDM4-OCP, which yields desired 4x capacity increase as 400G link speeds, but with 100G optics.
The refreshed fabric includes Minipack, a new modular block switch Facebook developed with Arista Networks. The Minipack switch easily integrates into various data center topologies while also consuming half the power of its predecessors. Facebook calculates that Minipack will consume 50 percent less power and space than its predecessor. Its modularity enables it to serve multiple roles in the new topologies.
In addition to Minipack, Facebook also jointly developed Arista Networks’ 7368X4 switch.
Both Minipack and the Arista 7368X4 are being contributed to OCP, and both run FBOSS.
Facebook has also developed HGRID as the evolution of Fabric Aggregator to handle the doubling of buildings per region.
https://code.fb.com/data-center-engineering/f16-minipack/
