Facebook has built its own switch. And it looks a lot like a server

Not content to remake the server, Facebook’s engineers have taken on the humble switch, building their own version of the networking box and the software to go with it.

The resulting switch, dubbed Wedge, and the software called FBOSS will be provided to the Open Compute Foundation as an open source design for others to emulate. Facebook is already testing it with production traffic in its data centers.

Jay Parikh, the VP of infrastructure engineering at Facebook shared the news of the server onstage at the Gigaom Structure event, explaining that Facebook’s goal in creating this project was to eliminate the network engineer and run its networking operations in the same easily swapped out and dynamic fashion as their servers.

Facebook’s infrastructure is relatively unique in that it wholly controls it and has the engineering talent to build software and new hardware to meet its computing needs. Google is another company that has built its own networking switch, but it didn’t open source those designs and keeps them close. But many enterprise customers don’t have the technical expertise of a web giant, so the tweaks that others contribute to the Open Compute Foundation to make the gear and the software will likely influence adoption.