In a recent blog post, Frank Frankovsky, chairman/president, Open Compute Project, wrote that the next big project for the organization will be the development of a network switch. He writes, “It’s our hope that an open, disaggregated switch will enable a faster pace of innovation in the development of networking hardware; help software-defined networking continue to evolve and flourish; and ultimately provide consumers of these technologies with the freedom they need to build infrastructures that are flexible, scalable, and efficient across the entire stack.”

Najam Ahmad, director of Facebook’s network engineering team, has volunteered to lead the project, which “will focus on developing a specification and a reference box for an open, OS-agnostic top-of-rack switch.”