SoftIron today announced the availability of its latest top-of-rack switches that are built to run the open source SONiC network operating system and target hyperscale customers.

"Networking is the most neglected integrated thing that exists in IT right now," said SoftIron CEO Phil Straw in an interview with SDxCentral. "Networking has become this abstract thing that everyone plugs into ... but it doesn't really do anything for you. It provides connectivity; it doesn't provide any services."

Straw wants to change that, and he says pairing his company's hardware with the Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC) operating system is the way to do it.

Initially developed by Arista, Broadcom, Dell, Mellanox, and Microsoft, SONiC was contributed to the Open Compute Project in 2016. SoftIron is now betting that the open source project will give it a tailwind as it expands beyond storage into the networking space.

SoftIron claims its HyperSwitch delivers packet speeds of up to 1.8 Tb/s and, thanks to an embedded AMD EPIC 3000 series processor, has the ability to layer on additional functionality including firewalls, dedicated storage management, or other virtualized network functions.

"There is a lot you can do. Storage is probably the first place you'll see us exercise the network," Straw said, adding that SoftIron has aspirations far beyond storage. "Things like spine connectivity, software expressions, SONiC, how you have throughput on all ports, this is not typically done in top of rack or bottom of rack switching, which is what we're about to do."

SoftIron's HyperSwitch is available in three form factors. The HS34008 and HS 24008 both feature eight 100-Gb/s Ethernet ports and 40 25-Gb/s Ethernet or 10-Gb/s Ethernet ports respectively. Finally, the HS43200 features 32 100-Gb/s Ethernet ports. All three units are equipped with an intelligent platform management interface, redundant power supplies, and an AMD EPYC processor.

SONiC has seen widespread adoption since the project entered the public domain under the Open Compute Project.

Earlier this month Juniper, InsidePacket, Keysight Technologies, and Innovium collectively hopped aboard the SONiC bandwagon. Juniper says it has added support for the network operating system on its hardware and would be contributing to its ongoing development.