By Rajagopal Krishnaswamy, Associate Vice President, Product Marketing, Marvell
The networking industry has fully embraced the benefits of open networking. Organizations building cloud infrastructure, AI clusters, enterprise data centers and edge networks want the flexibility to choose the hardware and software solutions that best meet their requirements. Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC) has emerged as a powerful foundation for achieving that flexibility, enabling customers to adopt an open, community-driven network operating system across diverse environments.
But deploying SONiC in production requires more than installing software on a switch.
As networks grow in scale and complexity, organizations need validated software, operational visibility, lifecycle management, automation, and enterprise-grade support. Running modern infrastructure successfully requires a complete operational framework that helps teams deploy, manage, troubleshoot and evolve their networks over time.
That reality is driving the next phase of SONiC adoption.
By Kant Deshpande, Director, Product Management, Marvell
Disaggregation is the future
Disaggregation—the decoupling of hardware and software—is arguably the future of networking. Disaggregation lets customers select best-of-breed hardware and software, enabling rapid innovation by separating the hardware and software development paths.
Disaggregation started with server virtualization and is being adapted to storage and networking technology. In networking, disaggregation promises that any networking operating system (NOS) can be integrated with any switch silicon. Open source-standards like ONIE allow a networking switch to load and install any NOS during the boot process.
SONiC: the Linux of networking OS
Software for Open Networking in Cloud (SONiC) has been gaining momentum as the preferred open-source cloud-scale network operating system (NOS).
In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2025, 40% of organizations that operate large data center networks (greater than 200 switches) will run SONiC in a production environment.[i] According to Gartner, due to readily expanding customer interest and a commercial ecosystem, there is a strong possibility SONiC will become analogous to Linux for networking operating systems in next three to six years.
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