Cavium Collaborates with Microsoft to Showcase SONiC Compatibility at OCP US Summit 2017

SAN JOSE, Calif., March 8, 2017

SONiC is an open source project contributed by Microsoft which is comprised of a collection of networking software components required to build network devices like switches.

During the OCP US Summit being held in Santa Clara, Microsoft and Cavium will collaborate to showcase SONiC running on OCP AS7512-32X open network 100GE data center platform by Edgecore Networks, which features the XPliant programmable Ethernet switch device.

"SONiC is about cloud speed and scale," said Eric Hayes, VP/GM, Switch Platform Group at Cavium. "By supporting SONiC we are enabling developers to unleash innovation with cloud-scale agility, greatly improving data center network operational efficiency, and significantly increasing the ROI of the datacenter operator's switching infrastructure investment."

Cavium's XPliant Ethernet switch family is the first to deliver a high throughput programmable data center switching solution that is shipping today in production. Platforms based on the XPliant Ethernet switch family leverage its programmatic control of table resources and pipeline logic to meet the specific needs of the network architecture and while providing an advanced packet visibility and telemetry. In addition to programmability, the XPliant family of Ethernet switches architecture offers a fully centralized shared dynamically allocated packet buffer to absorb large packet bursts and provide advanced traffic management functions.

"Cavium's support of SONiC is another example of expanding the open networking community effort," said Jeff Catlin, VP Technology, Edgecore Networks. "Cavium's continuing contributions to these open initiatives help to develop rich ecosystems of differentiated solutions, including the Cavium XPliant based Edgecore AS7512-32X switch, an OCP open hardware design."

Yousef Khalidi, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Azure Networking, said, "With Cavium SONiC support, the data center operators are getting the option to use a programmable switching silicon, delivering the flexibility the industry needs to embrace the full agility of the cloud. Cavium silicon is included in the Microsoft SONiC showcase, along with other vendors, where we demonstrate sharing the same software stack across multiple switch hardware platforms."