Traditional networking relies on inflexible single-vendor solutions. But digital business is about agility, flexibility and speed, and waiting for a vendor upgrade or replacing infrastructure to implement a new network feature creates unacceptable slowdowns and costs.

Open-source networking solutions eliminate this network bottleneck and bring the data center into the modern era.

“We see an evolution that has paved the way for the customers to unlock their data center technologies and innovate,” said Saurabh Kapoor (pictured), director of product management and strategy for emerging network technologies at Dell Technologies Inc. “The modern data center is no longer centered around protocol stacks. It’s about agility, flexibility, innovation, network automation and simplicity.”

Kapoor spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, for a digital CUBE Conversation. They discussed the evolution of open networking and how Dell’s Enterprise SONiC Distribution is taking open-source networking into the mainstream. (* Disclosure below.)

Could SONiC become the Linux of open networking?

SONiC is an acronym for Software for Open Networking in the Cloud. The open-source project, donated to the community by Microsoft, revolutionized network operating by breaking the previously monolithic network operating system into multiple containerized components, according to Kapoor.

“Through the use of containerization, SONiC provides the network managers, the plug-and-play extensibility, the ability to run third-party proprietary or open-source application containers, and perform those in-service updates with zero downtime,” he said.

Industry analysis by Brad Casemore, research vice president of datacenter and multicloud networking at IDC Research Inc., predicted that SONiC could become the standard for enterprise NOS, with a potential market of $2 billion by 2024.

“There’s a strong possibility that during the next three to six years, SONiC is going to become analogous to Linux,” Kapoor stated.

Dell’s Enterprise SONiC Distribution was released in June 2021 with the vision to bridge the gap between hyperscale and enterprise networking capabilities. The solution brings open networking to the enterprise market, providing customers with an innovative, scalable open-source NOS that is supported and backed by an industry leader, according to Kapoor. He sees SONiC’s value proposition in distributed application use cases for modern data center environments, where customers are looking for cloud economics, a multi-vendor ecosystem, and open and flexible architectures.

“We’ve built up our portfolio with a plethora of options for integrations into open-source toolchains and also building enterprise partnerships with technologies that matter to the customers,” he said.

Here’s the complete video interview, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations.

(* Disclosure: This segment was sponsored by Dell Technologies Inc. Neither Dell nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE