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.

InsidePacket’s ipOS offering, which is built on a programmable white-box Broadcom switch, brings a load balancer and distributed denial-of-service mitigation to the latest version of SONiC. The company focuses on “providing value in advanced networking services that are traditionally considered outside of scope and capabilities of a switch,” founder and CEO Eli Karpilovski wrote in response to questions. 

InsidePacket’s modular software stack, which can run applications in dedicated containers, is an architecture that “resonates natively with [the] SONiC approach and adding InsidePacket functionality as SONiC containers was fairly straightforward,” Karpilovski explained.

The company plans to contribute its version of SONiC back to the broader community and Karpilovski claims that enable InsidePacket to be “the first company in the world today to support Broadcom’s Jericho2 based white-box switch.” It plans to release a SONiC chassis-based offering later this year. 

Keysight Technologies said it joined the SONiC community to contribute test methodologies, automation, and results to help network operators benchmark performance of SONiC-based data center switches. That test environment will work on servers, top-of-rack switches, as well as leaf and spine architecture, according to the company.

Finally, Innovium said its Teralynx switch silicon marks one of the first deployments of programmable switch systems in production that can support up to 12.8 Tb/s in cloud networks on SONiC.

When Mellanox announced support for SONiC on its Ethernet switches in September 2019, it said its approach stands out from other chipmakers by making the open source community edition of the technology available and fully supported across hardware and software. Apstra, an intent-based networking pioneer, extended enterprise support for SONiC in January noting that, although SONiC remains more popular among service providers and hyperscale clouds, more enterprises are also deploying the open source network operating system.