For customers considering disaggregated network operating system (NOS) software solutions, IP Infusion extends its portfolio by supporting the Commercial SONiC Distribution. With 20 years of expertise in NOS solutions and advanced support capabilities, IP Infusion offers customers a fully validated solution based on open source SONiC.
SONiC (Software for Open Networking in the Cloud) is an open source network operating system based on Linux that runs on merchant silicon-based platforms and is in production today at multiple web-scale companies for Data Center fabric deployments. SONiC has a thriving developer community and vendor ecosystem. The underlying architecture of SONiC is described at
GitHub.
With Commercial SONiC Distribution, IP Infusion expands the use cases targeted at disaggregation of service provider networks, such as leaf, spine, super-spine data center CLOS topologies, and network management. IP Infusion’s 24 x 7 x 365 support team is ready to provide world-class support to any service provider or data center operator interested in leveraging a Commercial SONiC Distribution.
Based on open source SONiC with advanced features and support
The commercial offering based on open source SONiC delivers feature enhancements and hardening that is targeted at Data Center leaf, spine, and super-spine deployments. The Commercial SONiC Distribution is available on Edgecore Networks, Quanta white box solutions, and Broadcom silicon platforms.
The Commercial SONiC Distribution offers benefits such as cloud performance and simplicity based on industry leading merchant-silicon and standards-based IP-CLOS architecture. It also provides agility driven by a Unified Manageability Framework with programmatic APIs and an extensible, container-based architecture. Its open source foundation and standardized ecosystem provide strong economic benefits for a Data Center fabric solution.
Customer use cases
Data Center L3 CLOS (Underlay)
The Cloud editions are targeted for Data Center Fabric deployments (Public, Private, and Edge compute). Commercial SONiC Distribution can be deployed at various Places-In-Network (PIN) – ToR, Leaf, Spine, Super spine and Border Leaf PINs.
SONiC-based data center fabrics can be deployed in an underlay use case for web-scale data center architectures, or for data center PODs in enterprises or service providers for select workloads, such as Hadoop, that require an underlay network. Commercial SONiC Distribution can also be used in enterprises and service providers as an underlay data center fabric for VMware-based PODs deploying VMware ESX, NSX, vSAN, and other VMware solutions.
Data Center L3 CLOS Overlay (with VXLAN and BGP-EVPN)
Commercial SONiC Distribution can also be deployed in enterprises or service providers for select workloads, such as Hadoop, that require an overlay to support multi-tenancy.
Using an overlay architecture in the data center allows end users (network administrators) to place endpoints (servers or virtual machines) anywhere in the network and remain connected to the same logical Layer 2 network, enabling the virtual topology to be decoupled from the physical topology. This decoupling allows the data center network to be programmatically provisioned at a per-tenant level.
Overlay networking generally supports both Layer 2 and Layer 3 transport between servers or VMs. It also supports a much larger scale. SONiC overlay networks use a control-plane protocol (BGP-EVPN) to facilitate learning and sharing of endpoint information and use VXLAN tunneling protocol to create the data plane for the overlay layer.
Resources:
Feature Matrix Product Brief
