$ man open-networking
Open networking, explained.
For thirty years a switch was one product: metal, chip, operating system, support contract and roadmap, all from the same company. Open networking breaks that bundle apart. You buy the hardware from one supplier, the network operating system from another, and support from whoever is actually good at it. That split is what the industry calls disaggregation.
# the layers, once they're apart
// layer 1
The hardware
A white-box (or brite-box) switch built around merchant silicon — Edgecore, UfiSpace, Celestica. Ports, buffers, power and optics are a spec sheet you shop for, not a badge you're loyal to.
// layer 2
The install environment
ONIE sits in the switch's boot flash and pulls down a NOS image over the network. Same box, different operating system, whenever you decide.
// layer 3
The network OS
SONiC or OcNOS drives the ASIC through SAI. Config lives in a database and an API, not a proprietary text blob — which is why automation stops being an afterthought.
// layer 4
The support model
Community, a NOS vendor, a hardware vendor, or an integrator like us. You pick the level of hand-holding you need per layer instead of buying one bundle for everything.
# how it started
- 2005–2010
Merchant silicon arrives
Broadcom, Marvell and others start shipping switching ASICs that anyone can buy. The chip inside a premium vendor switch and a no-name switch becomes, increasingly, the same chip.
- 2011
Open Compute Project
Hyperscalers publish open hardware designs and refuse to pay a vendor premium for boxes they can specify themselves. Network hardware becomes a commodity the way servers already had.
- 2013
ONIE
The Open Network Install Environment turns a switch into something like a PC: a bare box with a boot loader that installs whichever network operating system you point it at.
- 2015
SAI
The Switch Abstraction Interface gives every ASIC a common API, so one NOS can drive many vendors' silicon. This is the piece that makes a portable NOS practical.
- 2016 →
SONiC and friends
Microsoft open-sources SONiC; IP Infusion's OcNOS matures for carrier and enterprise use. Open NOS moves out of hyperscale and into ordinary data centers, ISPs and enterprises.
# open vs. vendor lock-in
| dimension | single-vendor stack | disaggregated stack |
|---|---|---|
| Hardware choice | One catalogue, one price list | Any qualified platform on merchant silicon |
| Software | Tied to the chassis you bought | Portable NOS, replaceable independently |
| Pricing | Bundled; licences follow the badge | Line-itemed; hardware and NOS negotiated separately |
| Features | Ship when the vendor's roadmap says so | Upstream community plus commercial distributions |
| Automation | CLI scraping and vendor-specific tooling | Config database, gNMI, standard telemetry |
| Support | One throat to choke — and one queue to wait in | Chosen per layer; an integrator can own the seam |
| Exit cost | Refresh means re-buying the whole stack | Swap a layer without replacing the network |
Disaggregation is not free. You take on integration work that a single vendor used to absorb, and you need someone who can read a SAI log as easily as a BGP table. That's the job we do.
Thinking about your next refresh?
We'll walk your topology, tell you honestly where open networking fits and where it doesn't, and scope a pilot you can actually measure.