SoftIron Bets On SONiC With Hyperscale Switches

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.