Equinix to Use Facebook Data Center Switches for Interconnection Platform

Data center services giant Equinix is planning to deploy Wedge networking switches Facebook designed for its own data centers and open sourced through its open source hardware community, the Open Compute Project.

Deployment of the switches is the first step in what Equinix expects will be an “open source” platform for software and hardware inside its data centers around the world. It will be used to enable interconnection between the data center provider’s customers and partners. Equinix said it will collaborate with Facebook to build it.

Another piece of open source technology that will be part of the platform is the Data Center Operating System by Mesosphere, which has open source Apache Mesos at its core. DCOS aggregates disparate compute resources in a data center, turning them into virtual pools, making it easier for developers to build software without worrying about the types of hardware it will run on.

More and more software will have to be able to run on massive-scale infrastructure that often spans the globe, and technologies that have come out of OCP have all been developed originally to support some of the largest-scale infrastructures, data centers operated by the likes of Facebook and Microsoft, which have been designed for scale from the ground up.

Earlier this year, Equinix joined a newly formed initiative within OCP, the Open Telco Project, launched by a group of major telecommunications firms, including AT&T, Verizon, and Deutsche Telekom, among others. Today’s announcement builds on that move.

Equinix doesn’t want to become a technology vendor, but its business model relies to a great extent on interconnection. Joining the OCP Telco project is a way to future-proof that business model, Equinix CTO Ihab Tarazi told us earlier.

All the major telcos are the data center provider’s customers, and they connect to each other, to cloud providers, and to customers in Equinix data centers using IP protocol. As they make key decisions about the next-generation technologies they will use in the future, Equinix wants to be part of the conversation, Tarazi explained.