Facebook Inc. is well on its way to becoming a self-sufficient technology company, and yesterday the social network took it a step further by unveiling its own scalable networking hardware that will help connect Facebook’s 1.3 billion users.

“Over the last few years we’ve been building our own network, breaking down traditional network components and rebuilding them into modular disaggregated systems that provide us with the flexibility, efficiency, and scale we need,” wrote Yuval Bachar, a hardware engineer at Facebook.

“We had a TOR, a fabric, and the software to make it run, but we still lacked a scalable solution for all the modular switches in our fabric. So we built the first open modular switch platform.”

“6-Pack”

The new hardware, dubbed “6-Pack,” features a scalable design where each element runs on its own operating system from a local server and is completely independent from the other elements in the case. Each element even has its own cooling system that is separate from the others. This independent design allows elements to be modified without affecting the whole system or requiring other changes to software or hardware.

Several features in the 6-Pack system were taken from technology Facebook had developed in the past, including the “Wedge” network switch and the Linux-based FBOSS operating system. Facebook is calling 6-Pack “an open hardware modular switch.”

With roughly 20 percent of the world’s population using Facebook’s services, its network handles more data traffic than many countries, and the constantly changing demands on its services created the need for scalable hardware that could handle immense volumes of data.

“There are efficiencies in terms of people and money, and total cost of ownership models,” said Facebook’s vice president of engineering, Jay Parikh. “Most of our big bets are based around huge changes in flexibility though.”

As more and more companies begin handling so much data, the need for flexible hardware will grow.

According to Parikh, if Facebook “wants the industry to rethink its practices,” it will need to continue developing innovative hardware like the 6-Pack networking system to drive the changes it wants to see.

Image credit: Facebook