[nbm]

I work in a somewhat related team (Traffic/CDN) at Facebook, and I'm very excited about what this is going to allow us to do in future.

Current switches just don't support the deployment, monitoring, and configuration power we have for servers. While we've done a lot (probably close to the most than can be) to bring them somewhat close to par, Wedge should not only leapfrog to equality, but also use the same infrastructure - and gain whenever the server processes improve.

The opportunities opened by being able to quickly canary some new features (without doing a firmware upgrade before turning on and again after turning it off), have detailed logging and monitoring and reusing our existing tools for correlation and comparison, and to do some things we currently are forced to do on separate machines now are fairly large.

[joshAg]

What managed switches did you guys try and find lacking?

[nbm]

This isn't my area, so I don't know what we've previously disclosed or what agreements we might have in place with vendors about, say, not mentioning them, so I don't feel comfortable disclosing that.

If it was anything like experiences in other cases, my suspicion (as I said, not my area) is that switch vendors have relatively few customers like us (certainly few that discover bugs, change configuration, upgrade firmware nearly as often as we do, or who make use of the particular set of features we do at the same time), and so some things we really would want would not really be in their interest to work on relative to things that would be useful to most of their customers.

At some point it probably became worth trying something new like Wedge/FBOSS (which while technically hard at least can build on our experience building hardware and software for servers) in the hopes of improved turn-around time and getting the features we want further down the line.

I'll try remember to track down someone from the team to give a less vague answer after lunch.

[scott_karana]

Somehow I'm going to guess "all of them". ;)

(They were known to use Force10 switches at some point in the past: http://www.force10networks.com/company/customer_profiles/pdf...)