The open-source SONiC (Software for Open Networking in the Cloud) network operating system (NOS) is increasingly being adopted by organizations. While SONiC is a powerful and flexible system, there can be a need for support and additional tools to operate and maintain; this is where San Jose-based Aviz Networks is looking to play a strong role.

Aviz Networks provides software and services that make it easier for enterprises to test, deploy and manage SONiC disaggregated NOS options across their networks. The company aims to drive multivendor SONiC adoption while keeping the NOS rooted in its open-source, community-driven origins.

Aviz Networks today announced that it has raised $10 million in a seed round of funding. The funding includes $4 million that had been previously raised and $6 million in new funding. The additional funding was led by none other than Cisco Investments, who now joins existing investors Moment Ventures, Accton and Wistron. The funding is in part a validation for the company, which was founded in 2019, that there is active demand for the SONiC solutions.

"Our DNA is community-first," Vishal Shukla, cofounder and CEO of Aviz Networks, told SDxCentral. "We want to make sure SONiC remains community-driven."

Aviz Networks does not make its own SONiC distribution; rather, it works with partners like Cisco, Broadcom,  Edgecore, Nvidia, Marvell, Supermicro and others to provide tools and services that normalize SONiC for enterprise use cases.

This includes products for testing, deployment, visibility, orchestration and enterprise support across diverse SONiC environments. The goal is to eliminate lock-in and give customers choice and control, while still benefiting from the cost savings and flexibility of open networking.

Shukla said Aviz can and does work with silicon manufacturers to help fix bugs when needed as issues arise. He sees his company as being similar in some respects to how Red Hat runs a commercial business supporting Linux, with the addition of monitoring functionality that a vendor like Datadog might provide.

"Customers, even Cisco for that matter, have partnered with us because they are seeing this shift in the market and they see it [SONiC] as the next Linux of the industry," Shukla said.

Support of SONiC isn't just about troubleshooting issues in the operating system, it's also about providing products and tools that support deployment and operation.

Aviz Networks' first product was the Fabric Test Automation Suite (FTAS), which helps to predict how a SONiC network will behave before it is actually deployed. The Open Networking Enterprise Suite (ONES) provides orchestration and visibility for SONiC environments. ONES also has APIs for other network operating systems including  NX OS, EOS and Cumulus, so that it paves the path for the migration toward SONiC.

Going a step further, Aviz Network also has the Open Packet Broker (OPB) that is a SONiC-powered traffic capture and analysis tool.

[caption id="attachment_136370" align="alignnone" width="500"] Image credit: Aviz Networks.[/caption]

Looking ahead, Aviz Networks plans to accelerate SONiC adoption, mature its products and develop new capabilities in generative artificial intelligence (genAI)-based approaches using network and application data.

"Cutting across everything, there will be a generative AI layer," Shukla said.

Shukla said that Aviz Networks has a lot of data from the network control plane via ONES and application plane data from the OPB.

"So you have an infrastructure-aware product and you have an application-aware product; you put them together and now you have the data end to end," he said. "So what do you do with that data? That's where generative AI comes into the picture and we want to get into the use cases [that] have never been tried before."