Facebook is designing a new version of its Wedge network switch

Facebook is designing a new version of its top-of-rack switch, codenamed Wedge.

Jay Parikh, Facebook's vice president of global engineering and infrastructure, unveiled the latest model on Thursday morning at the Structure cloud summit in San Francisco.

The world's largest social network boasted it already hit the limits of what 40 Gbps switches can handle.

Thus, the new and improved Wedge 100 consists of a 32x100G switch that can handle 100 Gbps per port.

Wedge was first unveiled amid the last Structure conference in 2014.

Developed as an alternative to traditional network switches with fixed hardware configurations, Wedge was designed to support a wide range of microservers from across the open hardware ecosystem.

Facebook's engineering team explained this means that Wedge is deployed within a data center, engineers can add software to address specific challenges based on their own IT environments and infrastructures.

Since then, Facebook says it has scaled both Wedge and FBOSS, the Linux-based operating system crafted for Wedge, for deployment from a few switches to several thousand.

The network switch was pushed back into the spotlight again this past spring amid a slew of other open source hardware, software and data center frameworks in line with Facebook's commitment to the Open Compute Project.

The Wedge 40 is still available for order from networking equipment provider Accton to IT professionals who want to use and customize the hardware.

A release date for the Wedge 100 hasn't been revealed yet, but Facebook promised it would share an update soon.