Equinix Adopts Facebook's Wedge Switch

Equinix has joined the Open Compute Project and will make use of Facebook-designed Wedge switches in its international chain of 145 data centers.

The move puts one of the premier data center and telecommunications hub operators behind the Open Compute Project, which has been backed by firms in the financial services industry such as Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, CapitalOne, and Fidelity, but has not seen broader support. All the named firms tend to have large IT staffs.

About 1,100 commercial telecom providers come into the "meet-me" rooms of Equinix data centers around the globe. Equinix in turn connects enterprises to their customers, business partners, and cloud suppliers.

CTO Ihab Tarazi said in an interview that Equinix is working closely with Facebook on implementing the Wedge 100 switch in Equinix data centers, as well as on new designs for the Wedge. The Wedge is a generic hardware switch produced from designs contributed by vendors that can be produced by other vendors.

The Open Compute Project attempts to bring to hardware some of the shared community resources of open source software projects. It was started in April 2011 by Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and has been slowly adding new contributed designs and specifications for equipment in modern, large-scale data centers.

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