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ASIC Maker Innovium Announces SONiC-Certified Switches For The Cloud And Large Enterprises

Drew Conry-Murray

Innovium, which makes a line of programmable ASICs that compete with Broadcom, Barefoot, and others, has announced a switch family that comes with SONiC pre-installed. The switches, assembled in conjunction with ODM partners, run Innovium Teralynx silicon and the open-source SONiC network OS.

The pre-built switches, called TeraCertified, are aimed at Tier 2 cloud providers, service providers, and large enterprises. Options range from a 100G, 32-port ToR switch with a 3.2Tbit Teralynx ASIC to a 400G 32-port leaf/spine/core switch with a 12.8Tbit ASIC.

Innovium competes in the whitebox/disaggregation market. The value proposition of its TeraCertified program is straightforward: provide a switch package with the SONiC NOS already loaded. The customer doesn’t have to fiddle with installation or fuss with drivers and other components to get the NOS to work with the ASIC.

“We provide the binary for the customer using the [SONiC] community source, compile it, and use our SAI and SDK,” said Amit Sanyal, VP of Marketing at Innovium, in an interview with the Packet Pushers.

The TeraCertified line also handles optics and cabling, which also saves time for customers. While this does limit the choices that disaggregation provides, it also streamlines the consumption process while still giving the customer an open-source, customizable NOS (and a potentially competitive price, though your mileage may vary).

What About Support And Management?

Sanyal says either Innovium or a system partner will provide hardware and software support, including the NOS. Reliable support is critical if open-source NOS alternatives are to gain traction outside the rarified environs of the hyperscalers. These giants have the personnel and technical chops to build the tooling to run fleets of open-source switches.

Innovium does note that its support extends only to the NOS distro the switch came with. Because SONiC has a modular design, customers can swap out components such as the routing stack. If a TeraCertified customer changes any components that shipped with the switch, the customer becomes responsible for those components.

Another potential hurdle for SONiC and other open-source NOSs is management. SONiC supports a CLI so network engineers can program individual switches and write scripts. SONiC is Linux at its core, so it can also be managed with tools like Puppet and Ansible. But there’s an opening for networker-friendly options in the market.

Drew’s View

The TeraCertified play is a smart way for Innovium to move its silicon. By offering customers a tidy switch package with a competent NOS, it can tap into the interest of cloud providers and others that want to take more control over their networks.

The Tier 2-and-below crowd are primed to adopt a more NetDevOps style of operation so that they can deploy new services and iterate them more quickly. A solution that offers the SONiC NOS, which they can manage the same way they do Linux servers, on a hardware platform that may save a few bucks without sacrificing throughput, may compel them to look beyond the typical Broadcom/proprietary NOS pairing.

Availability

Innovium says its TeraCertified switches for 100G, 200G, and 400G will be available in mid-2021. The company also plans to have an 800G switch by the end of the year.

About Drew Conry-Murray: Drew Conry-Murray has been writing about information technology for more than 15 years, with an emphasis on networking, security, and cloud. He's co-host of The Network Break podcast and a Tech Field Day delegate. He loves real tea and virtual donuts, and is delighted that his job lets him talk with so many smart, passionate people. He writes novels in his spare time.