Mellanox Technologies today announced support for the SONiC networking operating system on its Ethernet switches. The chipmaker jointly developed the open source network OS based on Linux with Microsoft, Arista, Broadcom, and Dell, and the companies contributed it to the Open Compute Project in 2016.

The Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC) was first created by Microsoft for its Azure cloud, and it runs on switches and ASICs.

Mellanox, which is being acquired by Nvidia in a $6.9 billion deal, says it stands out from other chipmakers by making the open source community edition of SONiC available and fully supported across hardware and software. “There’s a couple other vendors that claim some support, but in general they don’t have the ASIC themselves or a lot of times it’s just hardware support, but here we’re going to have full support,” said David Iles, senior director of Ethernet switching at Mellanox.

Mellanox describes its full support for SONiC as “ASIC to protocol,” and that includes service calls, troubleshooting, and bug fixes for customers. While other vendors like Cisco support SONiC, their customers are offered a “hardened version of SONiC” that’s essentially another proprietary technology that maintains a lock on that customer for the vendor, Iles said.

“If you can remove vendor lock-in, that’s going to open up competition both for hardware and for software, and if you can open up competition you’re going to end up with a higher return on investment for your customers,” he said.

“[SONiC] may be one of the very few fully open source operating systems for data centers out there,” Iles explained, arguing that it should be embraced and adopted as such. “We open source as much technology as we can. We’re usually the top 10 contributors to Linux every year. We’re the No. 2 contributor to SONiC.”

Iles argues that Mellanox’s approach sets it apart from incumbent vendors like Cisco. [We’re] very different than these closed vendors who talk about open technology but as soon as they get you down at the table and they close the door they sell their closed solution,” he said. “We’re quite a bit different in that we make the hardware and we’re not afraid of embracing these open software solutions.”

The vendor wants to “democratize” SONiC and “bring web-scaled innovations to smaller shops,” Iles said. Mellanox already supplies technology to most of the hyperscale cloud providers, according to Iles, and with SONiC it wants to help small- and medium-sized data centers embrace disaggregation. Support is the biggest roadblock to SONiC today for smaller data centers, he explained.

“Everybody wants to use open technology, but if something goes wrong you want to have someone that will take the phone call, someone that’s committed to fixing a bug,” Iles said. “We’re supporting the open source main community edition of SONiC and what that means is when we offer a bug fix or a change it all gets contributed back to the community.”

Mellanox also intends to put SONiC on equal footing with other network operating systems including Mellanox Onyx and Cumulus. That strategy flows from Mellanox’ Ethernet Cloud Fabric technology, which supports the disaggregation of hardware and software on white boxes.