Cisco joins $10M funding round for Aviz Networks' enterprise SONiC drive

Under that partnership, Cisco’s 8000 series routers will be available with Aviz Networks’ SONiC management software and 24/7 support. The support aspect of the agreement may be the most significant portion of the partnership, as both companies attempt to assuage customers’ anxiety about supporting an open-source NOS.

Aviz offers Open Networking Enterprise Suite (ONES), a suite of software to manage SONiC networks. From its SONiC-based controller, ONES supports zero-touch provisioning and configuration validation. It includes SONiC configuration templates for data-center leaf/spine configurations and supports standard networking technologies such as EVPN, VxLAN, and Border Gateway Protocol (BGP).

While SONiC is starting to attract the attention of some large enterprises, deployments today are still mainly seen in the largest hyperscalers. With its partnership, Cisco and Aviz are making SONiC more viable for smaller cloud providers, service providers, and those very large enterprises that own and operate their own data centers, Cisco stated.

The vendor community supporting SONiC has been growing and includes Dell, Arista, Nokia, Alibaba, Comcast, Cisco, Broadcom, Juniper, Edgecore, Innovium, Nvidia, Celetica, and VMware. It has also been integrated with other open-source projects, including Kubernetes and Ansible, and is being used by Verizon, AWS, Netflix and others to develop cloud-based services.