Keysight Technologies and Aviz Networks Jointly Host Virtual SONiC PlugFest in China

Keysight Technologies and Aviz Networks Jointly Host Virtual SONiC PlugFest in China

Demonstrating the maturity of open source network operating systems and devices

Beijing, February 14, 2022 - Keysight Technologies and Aviz Networks jointly announced that they will hold the China SONiC open source network operating system community PlugFest testing event from January to March 2022. Aviz Networks provides ready-to-deploy SONiC solutions for data centers and edge networks. Keysight provides advanced design and verification solutions designed to accelerate innovation and create a secure and connected world.

SONiC is an open source Linux-based network operating system that can run on switches and application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) from multiple vendors. It uses a decentralized architecture (switch silicon, white box switches, and network operating system software are independent of each other) to enable users to flexibly create network solutions while testing with the collective power of a large ecosystem and community.

This event will fully draw on the successful experience of the SONiC PlugFest test event in the United States, empowering the SONiC community members in the Chinese region to verify the SONiC readiness of various manufacturers. The open community test event in China will attract three parties to participate:

• Client: Client Advisory Board (CAB)

• Manufacturers: Original Design Manufacturers (ODM), Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM), and Network Equipment Manufacturers (NEM)

• Testing partners: Keysight Technologies and Aviz Networks

"Keysight's PlugFest in the U.S. fully demonstrated the strengths and weaknesses of SONiC," said Dean Lee, senior director of Keysight Cloud Solutions. "With our vision to empower the SONiC community, we invite more vendors to participate in the PlugFest and validate the maturity of SONiC using standardized tests in our Ixia Open NOS Validation Suite (IONOS)."

“Aviz Networks is pleased to once again participate in PlugFest to provide testing content for a standard approach to validating SONiC,” said Vishal Shukla, co-founder and CEO of Aviz Networks. “We are leveraging the learnings from PlugFest in the U.S. to drive successful SONiC deployments across our customer base and look forward to a successful event in China.”

During the US SONiC PlugFest, SONiC adopters such as hyperscale data centers, network operators, enterprises and financial institutions also jointly established a customer advisory committee. The China PlugFest will cover similar CAB members and other members in China.

Cheng Wei, CTO of Network Chip at Suzhou Centec Communications Co., Ltd., said: "SONiC combined with the switch abstraction interface has created a solution platform that spans multiple fields and forms a complete chip, hardware and software ecological value chain. Standardized testing can promote the rapid maturity of ecological quality and also create an excellent opportunity for all links in the industry ecosystem to fully understand the SONiC ecosystem."

Wei Songbin, co-founder and chief product and marketing officer of Hangzhou Yunhe Zhiwang Technology Co., Ltd., said: "The global network equipment market is undergoing the largest transformation in nearly 40 years, rapidly evolving towards software-hardware separation and hardware-hardware separation. Yunhe Zhiwang uses open source SONiC as a breakthrough point.

Promote the implementation of overall network solutions and accelerate the formation of enterprise cloud. The PlugFest event provides us with an opportunity to verify the maturity of SONiC system integration and enable us to gain a deeper understanding of different application scenarios. "

"During the development of SONiC, implementing system simulation and interoperability testing of actual deployment scenarios through a reliable test platform has always been a challenge," said Dongwei Ni, SONiC project leader at Tianhong Technology. "Industry insiders hope to see test standards that are closer to end users to test the maturity of SONiC systems for white box switches. We are honored to contribute to the PlugFest event."

"SONiC open source network has attracted a wide range of vendors to join and form a series of comprehensive solutions, including AsterNOS from StarRongyuan," said Hu Bo, vice president of StarRongyuan Metadata Technology Co., Ltd. "Keysight's PlugFest event gave us the opportunity to verify the openness and operability of AsterNOS in SONiC networks, for which we are deeply grateful."

The PlugFest event will be held at the Keysight lab in Beijing, China. Keysight and Aviz Networks will provide a public test platform for PlugFest. The platform includes a data center architecture test environment that can test the performance and scale of SONiC to the limit. This test environment can be expanded in multiple dimensions, such as the number of hosts/servers, TOR switches, leaf switches, and spine switches, to simulate a hyperscale data center environment.