Aviz Networks launches enterprise-grade community SONiC distribution

The SONiC network operating system (NOS) was first open-sourced in 2017, and in recent years it has become a mainstay of networking vendors. But there are barriers to deployment in multi-vendor hardware environments.

While open-source code is available, actual SONiC operating system distributions — including all the tools needed to run, install and maintain the system — come in the form of vendor-specific implementations. Even though SONiC adoption in enterprise data centers has grown from hyperscaler experiments to mainstream deployments, enterprises face a fundamental problem: No turnkey option exists that works across multiple hardware vendors with production-grade support.

Aviz Networks spent years deploying SONiC in production environments, accumulating real-world operational experience. Those deployments were typical custom engagements for specific customers rather than a productized experience. The company identified recurring deployment barriers and built tooling to address them. Now, the company is building its experience into a product with the launch of Aviz Certified Community SONiC, a pre-tested distribution based on the open-source code supporting silicon from Nvidia, Cisco, Marvell and Broadcom.

Aviz Certified Community SONiC is still based on open-source community SONiC, but Aviz has turned it into a pre‑tested, multi‑ASIC, enterprise‑ready distribution with added features, bug fixes, telemetry and 24/7 commercial support. Unlike single‑vendor enterprise SONiC flavors, it’s designed to be a hardware‑agnostic, Linux‑like standard NOS layer that runs consistently across switches from different vendors.

“It’s going to become a commodity where you use it like Linux,” Vishal Shukla, co-founder and CEO of Aviz Networks, told Network World. “In today’s world, you buy a server and you know Linux is going to work on it. It does not matter which vendor you buy the server from, but Linux will behave exactly the same on top of any server hardware.”

What Aviz added beyond base SONiC

Aviz made several key additions to address gaps in community SONiC deployments.

First, the company enabled FRR (Free Range Routing) features that exist in the community code but aren’t consistently implemented across different ASICs. VRRP (Virtual Router Redudancy Protocol) provides router redundancy for high availability. Spanning tree variants prevent network loops in layer 2 topologies. MLAG allows two switches to act as a single logical device for link aggregation. EVPN enhancements support layer 2 and layer 3 VPN services over VXLAN overlays. These protocols work differently depending on the underlying silicon, so Aviz normalized their implementation across Broadcom, Nvidia, Cisco and Marvell chips.

Second, Aviz fixed bugs discovered in production deployments. One customer deployed community SONiC with OpenStack and started migrating virtual machines between hosts. The network fabric couldn’t handle the workload and broke. Aviz identified the failure modes and patched them. 

Third, Aviz built a software component that normalizes monitoring data across vendors. Broadcom’s Tomahawk ASIC generates different telemetry formats than Nvidia’s Spectrum or Cisco’s Silicon One. Network operators need consistent data for troubleshooting and capacity planning. The software collects ASIC-specific logs and network operating system telemetry, then translates them into a standardized format that works the same way regardless of which silicon vendor’s chips are running in the switches.

Validated for enterprise deployment scenarios

The distribution supports common enterprise network architectures. 

IP CLOS provides the leaf-spine topology used in modern data centers for predictable latency and scalability. EVPN/VXLAN creates layer 2 and layer 3 overlay networks that span physical network boundaries. MLAG configurations provide link redundancy without spanning tree limitations.

Aviz provides validated runbooks for these deployments across data center, edge and AI fabric use cases. 

Solving the “where do I start?” problem

Traditional networking vendors deliver complete packages: hardware, software and support in one transaction. Community SONiC lacked this model, but that wasn’t necessarily the biggest challenge.

“The biggest challenge is, where do I start, right?” Shukla said. 

Shukla noted that an enterprise could just talk directly to a large vendor like Cisco, Arista, Juniper or Nvidia and ask for help to deploy SONiC on their switching hardware. That type of support and the ability to just get started easily with an open-source community distribution of SONiC was missing, according to Shukla.

Aviz provides downloadable builds matched to specific switch models. Enterprises can deploy without specialized SONiC expertise.

The SONiC software remains open source and free. Aviz charges for support subscriptions with enterprise SLA response times.

“Sonic is open source. Of course, we don’t expect customers to essentially pay for something which is open source,” Shukla said. “What customers will pay for is essentially the support and the monitoring, orchestration and netops functionality that we provide on top.”