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1 December 2022 – PLVision, a custom software product development company focused on open networking systems has announced the launch of its SONiC Core initiative aimed at extending the reach of Community SONiC to drive its adoption in new, demanding markets. PLVision’s initiative will help simplify and speed up SONiC deployments and SONiC-based product development.

SONiC, an open-source network operating system initiated by Microsoft, has proven to be a huge success in hyper-scale data centers, enabling a fast pace of innovation thanks to its powerful ecosystem support of 1,000 members. Offering cost-effectiveness and the ability to avoid vendor lock-in, SONiC is now extending its reach to new markets such as Tier 2 DC, Enterprise and the Edge (5G, Campus, IoT, etc.). Organisations operating huge amounts of data are attracted by SONiC’s flexibility and scalability facilitated by its container-based architecture and common Linux-based toolset to manage their entire network fabric. However, with the functionality available today, Community SONiC is not yet ready to fulfill all the specific requirements of the new markets.

As part of its commitment to broadening access to networks worldwide, PLVision has been actively contributing to open-source NOS communities, while working with SONiC for 7+ years, since its launch into open source. Leveraging its experience developing SONiC-based products, the company has combined a proven codebase with tooling and automation for CI/CD and lab deployment to serve as a foundation for SONiC Core.

Understanding the very nature of SONiC and its potential while advocating the importance of multi-dimensional vendor neutrality and interoperability, PLVision launched SONiC Core to help organisations with faster network disaggregation. The initiative also includes the gradual development of additional SONiC features to support new use cases and further upstreaming to Community SONiC to expand its capabilities. PLVision is committed to bringing Community SONiC to the next level of user experience and lowering barriers to mass consumption.

“We are firm believers in open networking and joint community effort,” says Leonid Khedyk, CTO at PLVision. “The only way SONiC can successfully meet the needs of the new markets is by making required functionalities available in open source. Our experience gained in collaboration with leading ASIC and OEM vendors has empowered PLVision to develop the expertise and IP that will help us achieve this goal. Both our customers and the community will be able to benefit, and that is what SONiC Core is all about.”

“SONiC Core stands for vendor diversity and interoperability,” says Taras Chornyi, PLVision‘s solutions architect and SONiC Core’s product owner. “On its network disaggregation journey, an organization should be able to use the best-fit platform for their SONiC use case and benefit from necessary set of features proven by the community. It’s the very goal of the open networking community’s efforts, and we are providing a boost to them with SONiC Core.”

“We are happy to see the ecosystem grow with PLVision’s SONiC Core distribution. This announcement is aligned with Marvell’s vision of growing SONiC deployments from edge to cloud,” says John DaCosta, vice president product marketing, Switch Business Unit at Marvell. “With our recent upgrade to a Premier Member of the SONiC Project, we are investing heavily in the SONiC network operating system across both the Teralynx and Prestera families of switches, in addition to planned support of Alaska PHYs, Marvell electro-optics and OCTEON DPUs.”

“With NVIDIA Pure SONiC, we provide world-class open Ethernet support to CSPs, telcos, and enterprises alike on the AI-optimized NVIDIA Spectrum Ethernet platform,” says Amit Katz, VP of networking at NVIDIA.”PLVision’s SONiC Core on Spectrum switches adds tooling and features that we believe will help grow the SONiC ecosystem.”

“Keysight is partnering with the SONiC ecosystem to provide the testing methodologies needed to ensure this open-source project succeeds,” says Dean Lee, senior director, cloud solutions at Keysight Technologies. “With the SONiC Core initiative focused on vendor neutrality and interoperability, Keysight’s test domain expertise is perfectly positioned to provide key contributions. Together with PLVision, our goal is to accelerate SONiC adoption and expansion into adjacent use cases.”

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