Proponents of SONiC made a strong showing at last week’s Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit, where vendors including Cisco, Microsoft, and Nokia championed SONiC’s capabilities as an open Ethernet platform for AI networking.
The Linux-based network operating system decouples network software from the underlying hardware and allows it to run on hundreds of switches and ASICs from multiple vendors. SONiC (which stands for Software for Open Networking in the Cloud) supports a full suite of network features, including Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), remote direct memory access (RDMA), QoS, and Ethernet/IP.
SONiC’s modularity, programmability, and cloud-based architecture make it a viable option for enterprises and hyperscalers to deploy as a traditional networking base. And increasingly, it’s being used for AI networking, largely in hyperscale environments.
The 650 Group forecasts that SONiC-based data center switching revenue will surge past $5 billion in 2026, driven by hyperscalers like Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud along with growth in community-hardened architecture for the neoclouds and enterprise. With that in mind, here’s some of the SONiC-related news from OCP Global Summit:
Extending Cisco-validated SONiC
Cisco announced that its Cisco-validated SONiC is available on its N9000 Series with Cisco Cloud Scale silicon for high-density 100G and 400G enterprise and web-scale leaf-spine tiers, and on the Cisco N9100 Series with Nvidia Spectrum-X ASICs for high-throughput, loss-sensitive backend AI fabrics.
The vendor also said it is extending its SONiC offering to the Cisco Silicon One ASIC–powered N9000 Series for ultra-high-density fabrics. Cisco already supports SONiC on its fixed and modular 8000 Series routers.
This will complete SONiC integration across the Cisco multi-silicon Nexus switching portfolio, according to a blog post by Surbhi Paul, director, product management, for data center AI networking at Cisco.
“For organizations deploying Cisco 8000 Series across WAN backbones and core transport, extending Cisco-validated SONiC to the Nexus switches creates a unified, end-to-end, open network fabric,” Cisco stated. “Customers eliminate vendor silos, leveraging a single supply chain, shared FRR routing tools, and one Technical Assistance Center (TAC) contract from the WAN edge deep into the data center core.”
“Built for AI infrastructure providers scaling 8000 to 32,000+ GPU clusters. High-density 400G/800G Cisco Nexus (N9100) switches (NVIDIA Spectrum-X) and Cisco Nexus (Cloud Scale) switches allow architects to tune RoCEv2 congestion algorithms (PFC/ECN) within SONiC, maximizing GPU training efficiency without risking multi-vendor support fragmentation,” Cisco stated.
Organizations can run Cisco NX-OS or ACI at the core for complex application policies while deploying SONiC on identical Nexus switches for specialized data pods, according to Paul. This approach secures hardware investment protection across changing operational needs and offers customers more software choice without giving up the operational support needed for these environments, Paul stated.
Microsoft and Nokia tackle SONiC networking issue
A technical session at the OCP Global Summit, hosted by Microsoft and Nokia, detailed work being done by the vendors to address a networking issue known as route programming.
Route programming is the process of translating routing decisions into forwarding state that the switch hardware can use. Improving it can matter when networks have large routing tables, experience frequent route changes, or need to recover quickly from failures, according to Deepak Singhai, an engineering manager with Microsoft.
The community work being done will help advance the speed at which SONiC networks can program routes and recover from changes, which is important to operating large AI and cloud fabrics, according to Singhai.
“The network gets churned, and the longer it takes to recover from that churn, the more impact you see in the customer,” Singhai said during the session. “If you talk about AI data centers’ scale-up scenario, network recovery is even more critical.”
SONiC working group grows
The Linux Foundation’s SONiC Foundation said it added three new members to its existing over 43 member group: Lenovo, NADDOD and Zhanwang (NEXAI). Each targets AI networking technologies.
Lenovo is building SONiC-based automation and AI-driven operations capabilities, with a focus on telemetry, BGP EVPN and RoCE, and it plans to contribute deployment experience and platform enhancements back to the community.
NADDOD uses SONiC across its AI data center switch portfolio and plans to contribute platform and SAI enhancements, interoperability testing, reference architectures and insights from real-world deployments.
NEXAI is porting SONiC to its networking products and plans upstream contributions spanning RDMA and RoCE, Priority Flow Control, SRv6, telemetry and AI network observability.
“AI infrastructure is raising the bar for networking, and the additions of Lenovo, NADDOD and NEXAI bring valuable knowledge from across the networking stack into the SONiC community,” Arpit Joshipura, general manager of networking, edge and IoT at the Linux Foundation, said in a statement. “Their participation will help advance an open, collaborative networking ecosystem that can evolve alongside the rapidly changing requirements of AI, cloud and data center infrastructure.”