Facebook Launches six-pack

Facebook is in the midst of a huge project that should be worrying Cisco.

Facebook is building an entirely new kind of network, using it to support its own massive operations, and — this is the scary part for Cisco — giving the software and designs for the hardware away for free.

This project has been going on for a while, but today Facebook announced another advance, a new networking product it calls the “6-pack.”

It’s interesting that Facebook chose today, the day Cisco reports earnings, to offer an update on the technology that challenges the network industry. Cisco is far and away the market share leader of this $US23 billion market, holding over 60% of it.

In its blog post, Facebook also called out how “traditional networking technologies…tend to be too closed, monolithic, and iterative for the scale at which we operate and the pace at which we move.” Another clear dig at the industry leader.

The 6-pack looks like this: