AI networks drive SONiC boom
Multiple factors are coming together to propel enterprise deployments of SONiC, the open-source network operating system (NOS) created 10 years ago by Microsoft to run on white box switches in hyperscale data centers.
Multiple factors are coming together to propel enterprise deployments of SONiC, the open-source network operating system (NOS) created 10 years ago by Microsoft to run on white box switches in hyperscale data centers.
The short version
- Dell’Oro Group predicts that SONiC-based switch sales in AI scale-out networks will grow at more than 50 % a year through 2030, when revenues will exceed $10 billion.
- And Gartner estimates that 2,500 organizations are running SONiC in production, and roughly one-third of those are enterprises.
- “SONiC is slowly and incrementally evolving from a niche white-box solution to a viable option on high-performance switches,” Gartner stated earlier this year in its data center switching guide.
What happened
Major switch vendors are on board Traditional enterprise switch vendors, including Arista, Cisco, Dell, and Nvidia, are offering support for SONiC on their hardware. But the opportunity to sell high-performance switches into the booming AI data center market is too lucrative to pass up.
Why it matters
And giving enterprises the option to deploy SONiC for specific use cases within the larger vendor ecosystem is a smart customer retention strategy.
Summary by Nerd News Network. Read the full article at Network World via the links above and below.