Server and storage interconnect solutions vendor Mellanox Technologies has offered to contribute its SwitchX-2 Top-of-Rack switch to the Open Compute Project, the Facebook-led open source hardware and data center design community.

The switch improves power consumption, latency and density, enabling larger, efficient and more cost-effective data center designs, according to Mellanox. It supports 48 10GbE SFP+ ports and 12 40GbE QSFP+ ports, enabling non-blocking connectivity within the OCP’s Open Rack, or alternatively, enabling 60 10GbE server ports when using QSFP+ to SFP+ breakout cables to increase rack efficiency for less bandwidth demanding applications.

The new switch is also the first that supports Open Network Install Environment (ONIE) over x86 processors, which will enable new levels of scalability and performance.

Najam Ahmad, director of network engineering at Facebook and project lead for the OCP network working group, said, “Mellanox, with its large portfolio of high-performance interconnect solutions, has been an important contributor to and supporter of the Open Compute Project. Mellanox’s proposed open switch design and software model will help the Open Compute community achieve its vision for true openness and a faster pace of innovation in network technologies.”

Kevin Deierling, VP of marketing at Mellanox, said, “We believe that the OCP standards provide best practices that will help more companies to build efficient solutions for the emerging web applications.”

In May 2013, OCP launched a new network project focused on developing an OS-agnostic top-of-the-rack switch. Accompanied by an open source boot loader defined by ONIE, any switch vendor can port its networking operating system to the open switch specifications being developed by the OCP community.

The software that interfaces to the switching hardware is defined by Open Ethernet Switching (OES) API, a generic and standard interface for fast path hardware acceleration. Along with the switching API, Mellanox is collaborating with the OCP community to define unified and open drivers for the OCP switch hardware components.