https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/ocp-2016-building-on-community-driven-innovation/
http://azure.github.io/SONiC/
https://github.com/Azure/SONiC/blob/gh-pages/architecture.docx?raw=true
http://www.qct.io/Product/Networking/Bare-Metal-Switch/QuantaMesh-BMS-T3048-LY9-p331c77c75c159
At Open Compute Project (OCP) summit 2016 Microsoft announced that it is giving away for free some software it designed for its own internal Azure cloud called Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC). Built with the help of Arista, Broadcom, Dell and Mellanox, the software giant announced it had submitted the technology to the OCP.
Microsoft’s Debian Linux-based toolkit is based on Apache 2 license and is seen as a direct competition to Cisco. Cisco still dominates the enterprise, but for running a large datacenter they are no longer cost-effective.This news can’t be making Cisco happy.
SONiC is software used to run an up-and-coming type of computer network switch that is rising in popularity, known as software-defined networking (SDN), that threatens to overturn Cisco’s stranglehold on the network switch industry.
"Together with SAI [Switch Abstraction Interface], SONiC will enable cloud operators to take advantage of hardware innovation while giving them a framework to build upon an open source code for apps on the network switch and gain the ability to integrate with multiple platforms," blogged Mark Russinovich, chief technology officer at Microsoft Azure. "In short, we believe it's the final piece of the puzzle in delivering a fully open sourced switch platform that can share the same software stack across hardware from multiple switch vendors."
SDN takes all the fancy features that an expensive switch offers and puts them into software, making networks easier to program, update and change. You still need the hardware, but you can use less of it, or less expensive models.
Microsoft is giving SONiC software away as part of its work with the Open Compute Project (OCP), an organisation founded by Facebook to build “open source” hardware for data centres the same way that the people behind the Linux operating system do with free, open source software.
OCP hardware designs are available for free for anyone to use, change, and contribute changes back to the group to use. Contract manufacturers are standing by to build the hardware. By extension, companies like Microsoft are contributing the software needed to run hardware to OCP, like SONiC.
Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich Facebook has also been taking shots at Cisco’s world. It has been designing creative new network switches that use low-cost hardware and open source software and giving those designs away to OCP. Several companies are building Facebook’s switches and selling them. Microsoft developed SONiC to use in its own cloud computing data centres.
By the way, Microsoft uses Ansible to manage the configuration of its switches, and that is one service on top of SONiC that Microsoft will make available. Others can bring Chef and Puppet support to the networking stack. The core bits of SONiC that come from Microsoft and that are available on GitHub include that switch state service, platform drivers for various ASICs, SNMP monitoring, and various utilities. The stack also draws in open source elements such as Quagga routing software, Link Aggregation Group (LAG) and Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP) protocols; a Redis key/value store is used to store the routing tables of the switch.
Example of low cost OCP switch:
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