Facebook is looking to revamp its data centers as the social networking site gears up for increasing demand for bandwidth. The company has introduced a new variant of networking switch called Backpack, which allows for faster data transfer speed.
Jay Parikh, Facebook's global head of engineering and infrastructure, said that the new networking switch is designed for developing and innovating data center hardware. The company had founded the Open Compute Project (OCP), an industry consortium for overseeing hardware blueprints including hardware for faster data transfer speed.
Facebook, in its blog post, stated that Backpack packs the power of a "set of 12 Wedge 100 switches connected together." The company plans to use this switch to link up various Wedge switches located in its different data centers.
Backpack is the final step towards the realization of Facebook's 100G data center pod. The design of this second-generation modular open switch platform has been submitted for review to OCP.
The social networking company had introduced its second-generation top-of-rack network switch, Wedge 100. Omar Baldonado, Facebook's director of software engineering on networking, told ZDNet, "To move from 40G to 100G, there were a lot of challenging hardware and optical and chip-level concerns the team had to address to get that to work."
Facebook is looking at ways to boost data transfer speed through its data centers. The company stated that Backpack is designed to require less power for its operations. It will work with FBOSS, which is the company's Linux-based operating system. It will also open source the framework for system management, OpenBMC.