MENLO PARK, California – Each month, Facebook puts up advertisements for new coding projects on its internal network. They're called Hack-a-Month-Projects. The idea is simple. Engineering staff can try working on new problems, and if they end up liking what they're doing, they get to switch teams.

It's a way of keeping Facebook's hackers challenged, but lately, something's been happening there that makes Najam Ahmad extremely happy. He's the director of Facebook's network engineering team – one of the people here who is working to change the DNA of the world's computer networks. Over the past year, he says, folks from Facebook's software group have been signing up for network engineering jobs.

That's remarkable because traditionally, network engineers are a breed apart. They master obscure protocols and the command line interfaces to Cisco and Juniper machines, but they don't typically hack the underlying software that powers these machines. Cisco's switches ship with an operating system called Cisco IOS. It's closed source, and the only people who get to hack it work for Cisco.

Najam Ahmad. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

But now Ahmad and others have been working to build a new breed of switches and routers – ones that will be hackable much like today's servers. "To me, this project is the start of something really, really big," says Ahmad.

Though the project was hatched only six months ago, you can already buy these routers from hardware makers such as Quanta and Accton, based on designs from Intel. On Monday, Broadcom, and Mellanox Technologies said that they too have completed their first designs. Facebook is testing all of these open source switches in its labs, and the company expects to deploy some version of them when its new Altoona, Iowa data center goes live in about a year's time. Eventually, all of Facebook will be running this type of gear if Ahmad gets his way.

This will give Facebook new flexibility to hack the software that runs its networks. But more than that, it will also demystify networking gear so that people can really understand what's going on inside their data centers. Frank Frankovsky – the Facebook executive who oversees his company's efforts to build open source servers and storage designs as well – says that while only six months old, the Open Compute Project's networking designs have already attracted more contributors than they initially expected – more than 30 at last count. "People have underestimated how curious people are," he says. "They want to take [a switch] apart and put it back together in a customized way."

This kind of customization has typically been at odds with big companies like Cisco and Juniper. For them, customization cuts into the bottom line. It costs more to build, document and support these types of products.

But if more companies see the benefits from having low-cost, hackable devices running their networks, then Cisco and Juniper could be facing the same kind of shake-up that hit old-school Unix companies such as Sun Microsystems and DEC, when cheap Linux boxes destroyed their high-margin businesses.

"What's unique here is that you could put any OS here," says JR Rivers, who spent more than a decade at Cisco before founding Cumulus Networks, a startup that's making software for the new Open Compute networking gear. "Traditional, very focused networking companies make phenomenal amounts of their profit off of repackaging hardware that doesn't have to cost as much as it does."