The open source SONiC network operating system this week gained broader
support from equipment and software vendors, including Juniper,
InsidePacket, Keysight Technologies,
and Innovium.
Developments in the community-led effort for Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC) was expected to be a highlight of the Open Compute Project Foundation’s global summit this week, but the event was canceled amid the coronavirus outbreak. The event, like many others, is now being rescheduled as a virtual event but some vendors proceeded with the news as planned.
Juniper said it is now supporting SONiC on its hardware and will be contributing to its ongoing development. It was originally developed by Arista, Broadcom, Dell, Mellanox, and Microsoft before it was contributed to the Open Compute Project in 2016.
SONiC is now supported on Juniper’s QFX5210 single ASIC platform, including support for leaf and spine deployments in data centers. With an assist from SONiC, Juniper claims its switches can now disaggregate the network operating system from multi-vendor switching fabric to enable a single operating system. It also enables SDN control of multi-vendor fabric, according to Juniper.
The company is also supporting SONiC in a hardware and software combo that claims to deliver better performance and scale. Juniper’s Containerized Routing Protocol Daemon routing stack can also plug into SONiC to implement policy-based routing, telemetry, automation, and programmability.
