Marvell Joins the Linux Foundation’s SONiC as Premier Member 

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Nov. 18, 2022—Marvell Technology, Inc., a leader in data infrastructure semiconductor solutions, has announced it has joined the Linux Foundation’s SONiC. Marvell also announced that John DaCosta, vice president of product marketing, Switch Business Unit, is now a member of the Governing Board. SONiC is an open-source network operating system (NOS) based on Linux that runs on switches. Marvell has joined SONiC as a Premier Member with the goal of extending SONiC beyond its initial use in data center networking applications to storage, edge, and data processing. Marvell intends to leverage SONiC-driven data infrastructure to open new market opportunities for the company.

“We are pleased to welcome Marvell to the Linux Foundation and the SONiC community,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge, and IoT at the Linux Foundation. “Marvell’s support for enterprise adoption within open-source is a welcome addition to the growing ecosystem.”

Created by Microsoft for its Azure data centers, SONiC offers a full suite of network functionality, such as BGP and RDMA, that has been production-hardened within leading cloud service providers. It offers teams the flexibility to create bespoke network solutions by leveraging the collective strength of a large ecosystem and community. To date, SONiC has been deployed by seven out of the top 10 cloud service providers, while being projected to reach an overall data center market share of 21 percent by 2025, including tier 2/3 cloud and enterprise data centers, according to 650 Group.

Additionally, with SONiC’s expansion into data processing units (DPUs) with SONiC-DASH (Disaggregated APIs for SONiC Hosts) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) enablement with PINS (P4 Integrated Network Stack), it delivers a compelling open-source NOS that enables a unified and flexible control and management plane.

Marvell’s contributions to SONiC include:

• A whitebox portfolio of Teralynx and Prestera switch systems running community SONiC supported by software and hardware partners, increasing the availability of disaggregated solutions.
• Ethernet Bunch-Of-Flash (EBOF) solutions running partner-hardened SONiC for next-generation storage use cases enabling managed ethernet storage fabrics.
• SONiC running on Arm-based silicon for edge and enterprise use cases reducing customer TCO by eliminating expensive hardware components and reducing power requirements.
• Extending SONiC support to Alaska PHYs, Marvell DSP-based optics and OCTEON DPUs.

“I am pleased to represent Marvell as the newest member of the SONiC Governing Board,” said John DaCosta, vice president product marketing, Switch Business Unit at Marvell. “SONiC is seeing rapid adoption, including Marvell-based deployments. With Marvell’s comprehensive cloud infrastructure product portfolio of Teralynx and Prestera switches, OCTEON DPUs, and high-speed Alaska PHYs, we look forward to contributing to this community and working with the ecosystem towards expanding SONiC into new realms, giving operators ultimate control over their networks.”

Collaborative Ecosystem

“Microsoft is excited to see Marvell join the Governing Board of SONiC and are looking forward to collaborating with them to grow SONiC into new areas, including edge networks, DPUs and storage, as well as expanding the silicon ecosystem that SONiC supports,” said Dave Maltz, technical fellow and corporate vice president, Azure Networking at Microsoft. “We look forward to Marvell’s contributions.”

“eBay built a large-scale global network infrastructure and deployed SONiC at scale as part of its open solutions strategy, bringing industry collaboration and faster innovation. eBay is excited to see Marvell’s increased commitment and investment into the SONiC community,” said Parantap Lahiri, vice president, Network and Datacenter Engineering at eBay.

The future of infrastructure relies on innovative software deployed to high-performance, power-efficient computing,” said Eddie Ramirez, vice president of go-to-market, Infrastructure Line of Business at Arm. “By enabling SONiC on its Arm-based DPUs and SmartNICs, and driving multivendor adoption of SONiC, Marvell is enabling an infrastructure where cloud and enterprise partners can reduce TCO.”

“Most end-users expressed interest in being agile like a hyperscaler, and SONiC is increasing in popularity to fill this role. SONiC finds its roots in the very early days of open networking,” said Alan Weckel, technology analyst at 650 Group. “SONiC will play an increasingly important role in data center networking during each year of our forecast projections. Marvell joining SONiC further validates SONiC’s emergence as an important element in data center networking.”

“We’re excited to see Marvell join the SONiC ecosystem. As storage fabrics evolve utilizing Ethernet as a transport, we believe SONiC will play a big role in its enablement. Today, high performance Ethernet-based storage fabrics rely on RoCE based RDMA which requires a network operating system capable of managing it,” said Bret Weber, executive vice president, global engineering operations at Data Direct Networks. “SONiC is a proven data center NOS deployed at scale enabling RDMA.”

“As a long-time member of the OCP Community, Celestica is committed to advancing open networking solutions,” said Gavin Cato, head and CTO, Hardware Platform Solutions at Celestica. “We are excited to see Marvell become a premier member of Linux Foundation’s SONiC project and look forward to further innovation as they contribute to the open-source SONiC community.”

“As one of the world's leading suppliers of information and communications products, Wistron Corporation has been investing in open, disaggregated and cutting-edge infrastructure. We have been collaborating with Marvell to provide highly innovative and comprehensive solutions for end customers,” said William Lin, EBG president at Wistron. “It is great to see Marvell stepping up investments in SONiC, so customers can benefit further from rapid innovation, industry collaboration and open-source solutions.”

“Aviz Supportability Stack with the Open Networking Enterprise Suite (ONES) as its backbone is designed to enable SONiC adoption in the enterprise,” said Gautam Agrawal, co-founder and CPO at Aviz Networks. “We are seeing a pent-up demand in SONiC deployments for edge use cases such as retail, campuses, and micro data centers. Marvell's ASIC is a key enabler of SONiC adoption for edge use cases, and Marvell joining The Linux Foundation as a Governing Board member is a welcome move. It significantly increases the hardware choices for customers looking to realize the potential savings with SONiC.”

“Hedgehog supports SONiC running on Marvell Teralynx and Prestera switches, DPUs and smartNICs with an open network fabric orchestrated by Kubernetes,” said Marc Austin, CEO of Hedgehog. “We are really happy that Marvell is all-in on open networking to make it easier for cloud native developers to deploy their workloads on high performance, cost-efficient data centers and edge computing environments.”

“By joining the Linux Foundation's SONiC project, Marvell will accelerate SONiC adoption for new markets, strengthening the collective effort to expand it beyond hyperscalers in order to effectively meet the network design requirements of tier 2 data center, enterprise, and the edge,” said Leonid Khedyk, chief technology officer at PLVision. “DASH, SONiC's response to the emerging DPU market, is also expected to get a significant boost. PLVision is looking forward to growth in the variety of hardware platforms supported by SONiC and additional software features to implement new use cases for our customers and the community.”

Source: Marvell