Juniper, Apstra, Big Switch Join Team Sonic

Juniper Networks, Alibaba, Big Switch, Apstra, and Dell EMC were among the vendors touting their SONiC support at the Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit.Microsoft developed the open source Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC) along with Arista, Broadcom, Dell, and Mellanox, before contributing it to OCP in 2016. SONiC uses the Linux kernel, and it allows cloud operators to share the same software stack across multiple switch vendors’ hardware. It can also run on various switching platforms via the Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) specification, which Microsoft open sourced to OCP in 2015.Today, 68 hardware platforms currently support SONiC, said David A. Maltz, who leads Microsoft Azure’s Physical Network team, during a keynote at last week’s OCP Global Summit. Looking forward, Microsoft plans to run all of its data centers on SONiC and extend it to support its management network, WAN, and even gaming, Maltz added. “We’ve got to go all in on SONiC,” he said.