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Why Facebook redesigned in-region interconnection
As data-heavy applications such as search, artificial intelligence, and machine learning grew, Facebook said traffic between servers and fabrics within a region rose substantially. The company reported that its conventional large, general-purpose chassis no longer met its needs for scale, power efficiency, and flexibility. In contemporaneous reporting, Facebook technical product manager Sree Sankar said the company was already using the largest switch available to it and needed to innovate. Data Center Knowledge reported in March 2018 that Facebook expected to need three times as many aggregation-layer ports as it had roughly a year and a half earlier. That was a historical planning estimate, not a current capacity forecast.
What Fabric Aggregator does
Facebook described Fabric Aggregator as a distributed system built from Wedge 100-family switches. A Fabric Aggregator node represents a unit of bandwidth that can be replicated to meet demand at a particular network tier. Its two-layer cross-connect architecture divides work by the destination of traffic:
- Downstream switches: Handle east-west traffic between fabrics within the same region.
- Upstream switches: Handle north-south traffic entering or leaving the region and aggregate those connections toward Facebook’s backbone.
Because the layers have separate roles, Facebook said it could increase regional east-west capacity independently from north-south capacity by adding subswitches to the relevant layer. The company summarized the intent this way: “Separating the solution into two distinct layers allows us to grow the east/west and north/south capacities independently by adding more subswitches as traffic demands change.” Facebook Engineering’s March 2018 design description is the primary account of the architecture.
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Repeatable switches instead of a single large chassis
Facebook said its documented implementation used Wedge100S switches running FBOSS, its open-source network operating system, with BGP routing between subswitches. The system was distributed rather than centrally controlled: subswitches operated independently, and Facebook said neither depended on another for operation. Upstream and downstream roles did not require different hardware or software, so the same kind of building block could serve either layer.
This design trades a large chassis for an assembly of repeatable components and cabling that Facebook said emulated a chassis backplane. In the company’s words, it chose “well known, simple, and open building blocks like Wedge 100 and FBOSS” and developed a cabling assembly to address challenges associated with an electrical backplane. The sources describe Facebook’s design rationale; they do not provide an independent comparison against other systems.
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Scaling and fault handling
Facebook said independent components helped isolate failures and let it vary node sizes between regions. For operations, the company described removing a faulty subswitch from service for debugging, or taking the upstream and downstream subswitches in a node out of service with tools that abstract their interactions. It also said node-level redundancy allowed multiple nodes to be taken out at once.
These are Facebook’s descriptions of its architecture and operating approach, not independently verified fault-test results in the available reporting. They explain how the system was intended to handle maintenance and component failures without making every switch part of one tightly coupled chassis.
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Choosing a rack layout and cable assembly
Facebook described both single-rack and multi-rack assemblies. It said the choice depended on available space and power, required capacity, and the desired failure boundaries; neither layout was presented as universally better.
| Deployment | Space and power considerations | Capacity and failure boundary |
|---|---|---|
| Single rack | Space and failure constraints are well defined; power parameters are tightly set by the user. | Capacity is bounded by the rack and its building blocks. |
| Multiple racks | Space and power parameters can be more flexible. | Capacity is defined by the room and its building blocks; failure constraints are room-defined. |
The engineering post lists four cable approaches and their supported deployment layouts:
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| Cable approach | Single rack | Multiple racks | Facebook’s stated topology detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| CWDM4 with single-mode fiber | Supported | Supported | Not further specified in the post. |
| PSM4 with parallel single-mode fiber | Supported | Supported | Not further specified in the post. |
| Pig-tail active optical cable | Supported | Not supported | Requires a sideplane topology. |
| Direct-attach copper cable | Supported | Not supported | Sideplane assembly integrated into the topology. |
Facebook said it submitted specifications for these backplane options to the Open Compute Project (OCP), making OCP a technical design reference for the work. The source does not establish current document availability or commercial terms.
What the reported efficiency figure means
Data Center Knowledge reported Sankar’s claim that Fabric Aggregator offered higher port density and 60 percent higher power efficiency than Facebook’s prior approach. The report gives no benchmark method or baseline, and Facebook’s engineering post does not supply an independent measurement of that percentage. It should therefore be read as a company-reported comparison from 2018, not as a verified general performance figure.
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A free scan shows the junk files, broken settings and background clutter dragging Windows down - then fixes them in one click.Free scan · Windows 10 & 11The same contemporaneous report said the design took about five months and rollout lasted nine months. Those are historical figures about Facebook’s reported design and rollout period. It also discussed the transition from 100G to 400G networking as a future power challenge at the time; those 2018 expectations are not a forecast of today’s deployment schedule.
What the 2018 sources establish—and what they do not
The March 20, 2018 Facebook Engineering post documents how the company said Fabric Aggregator was built and operated. Data Center Knowledge’s March 21 report adds attributed context and claims about efficiency, port growth, and rollout. Together, they explain the historical design response to rising regional traffic. They do not establish the system’s present deployment footprint, current performance, present-day Wedge100S availability, or the current status of OCP materials.
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