Aviz Networks today announced the launch of its Networking 3.0 vision with its new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered Network Copilot product as the big highlight.

Aviz got its start primarily as a provider of solutions and support for the open-source SONiC network operating system (OS). The networking startup also provides network operations software with its ONES platform, as well as its Open Packet Broker (OPB) capability. The company raised $10 million in a seed round of funding in November 2023 with support from Cisco Investments.

The new Network Copilot will function as an overlay on top of Aviz's existing products, enabling network administrators to more easily query, monitor and troubleshoot network operations.

Aviz Networks is positioning its approach as the Networking 3.0 model.

“Networking 3.0 is a new approach to networking that leverages data-driven and AI-driven techniques to automate network operations and improve efficiency,” Vishal Shukla, CEO of Aviz Networks told SDxCentral.

The centerpiece of Networking 3.0 is Network Copilot, an AI assistant for networks.

Aviz has been building out the Networking Copilot with different large language model (LLM) technologies over the last several months. Shukla said development started with OpenAI, then the company shifted to using the LLama 2 LLM and is currently using the open-source Mistral 7B, a 7 billion parameter model.

Shukla explained that the technology works by first collecting and normalizing data from customers' networks through Aviz's ONES framework and packet broker products. This data is stored in the company's One DL data lake.

[caption id="attachment_138531" align="alignnone" width="1570"] Image source: Aviz Networks.[/caption]

Network Copilot then trains on this historical network data as well as contextual data defined by customers. When users ask Network Copilot questions, it understands the intent using its LLM and returns insights by querying the underlying data lake. It can also generate configuration templates, queries and dashboards directly through natural language processing (NLP) prompts.

Network Copilot isn't just about being able to ask questions about network operations; Shukla sees Network Copilot acting as an agent to optimize networks. Optimizing networks includes the ability to simulate configurations and different conditions to achieve the best configuration.

“Network Copilot can use the ONES engine to essentially do the simulation,” Shukla said. “It can generate configurations using SONiC templates and orchestrate changes through the existing ONES framework.”

Network monitoring has long been driven by dashboards, where different stakeholders can quickly take a look to determine status. But what happens when there is an outage? Or if there is a question about a specific operation that an existing dashboard does not provide?

Shukla said Network Copilot will be able to generate templates for network configurations and dashboards directly through NLP queries.

“We want to have a user-defined dashboard generation for customers wherein you don't have to correlate from 10 different dashboards to come to a conclusion,” he said.

Network Copilot is also designed to provide different insights tailored to network executives, engineers and operators.