[October 06, 2014]

Pica8 Adopts ONIE

Pica8, the leader in open systems for software defined networking (SDN), today announced that it has adopted the Open Network Install Environment (ONIE), which has been accepted by the Open Compute Project (OCP (News - Alert)) Foundation. Providing an open standards platform for network operating systems like Pica8's PicOS™, ONIE is accelerating the widespread adoption of bare metal switches by making it much easier for customers to buy and deploy standards-based network hardware. ONIE comes pre-loaded on bare metal switches from leading switch manufacturers, and as such, it dramatically reduces the overall capital and operating cost of network switches.

"Our goal is to enable choice in selecting network hardware and software, and PicOS supports bare metal switches from major original device manufacturers," said Steve Garrison, Vice President of Marketing at Pica8. "By supporting ONIE, we make it easier than ever for our customers to integrate PicOS onto the bare metal switches of their choice."

The ONIE ecosystem includes supporters from the switching, software, and silicon manufacturing sectors.

Switching OEMs

"Our hardware switches ship with ONIE to allow customers to automate their network infrastructure with a variety of switch OS software choices today and to support additional choices of switch OS software in the future," said George Tchaparian, Senior Vice President of Engineering and Business Development of Accton Technology (News - Alert) Corporation, the parent company of Edge-Core and developer of its data center switches.

"Inventec is a strong proponent of open-source and the open-source community, and ONIE provides an environment for automated OS provisioning," said Daphne Chen, irector, NIDC of Inventec Corporation. "It is great to see Pica8 adding ONIE support, as it brings a tremendous opportunity for customers and vendors to choose their own hardware and OS."

Software Vendors

"We are excited to see Pica8 adopt ONIE," said Kyle Forster (News - Alert), Co-Founder of Big Switch Networks. "All of us in the open / bare metal switching ecosystem recognize that collaborating on common components like this plays a role in improving software quality while reducing costs. Collaboration on ONIE in particular really streamlines the user experience across the spectrum of software and hardware vendors."

"ONIE was created and contributed to the Open Compute Project to enable customer choice, allowing independent selection of the best-fit switching hardware and software for each environment," said Reza Malekzadeh, VP Business, Cumulus Networks. "With Pica8 joining the ranks of ONIE, customers and suppliers alike benefit as the open networking movement expands."

Silicon Manufacturers

"ONIE provides one of the industry's best conditions for installing a growing number of network operating systems on top of Broadcom StrataXGS® Trident (News - Alert) II switch platforms," said Eli Karpilovski, Director of Product Marketing at Broadcom. "We are excited to support new OS vendors adopting this model and embracing the vision for the Open Network Switch specification and Open Compute Project."

"For more than a decade, Mellanox (News - Alert) has been enabling the use of more data by opening the networking bottlenecks using faster speeds," said Amit Katz, Sr. Director, Product Marketing at Mellanox Technologies. "Mellanox 10/40Gb/s Ethernet switches are based on the Open Ethernet architecture providing our customers with the flexibility to use any software for achieving highest data center performance and overall return on investment. ONIE is an important enabler for Open Ethernet and we are happy to see the expansion of its adoption by Pica8 within the ecosystem."

"It's great to see Pica8 providing support for ONIE on PicOS," said Tsahi Daniel, co-founder and CTO of XPliant. "Our XPA switch ASIC is based on the principles of providing openness and flexibility for our customers. OCP and ONIE are important in providing the same benefits - allowing the customer to choose the best solution."

About Pica8, Inc.

Pica8® pioneered open networking with PicOS™, the first network operating system that enables customers to easily migrate from conventional networking to software-defined networking (SDN) using commodity bare metal switches. PicOS provides extensive support for traditional switching and routing protocols and delivers SDN solutions through Pica8's adoption of Open-vSwitch (OVS). Pica8 can provide PicOS, switching hardware or both in a fully integrated package as part of an end-to-end data center SDN solution, and makes adopting SDN easy with a Starter Kit that enables deployment in hours rather than months. Pica8 is a global company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. For more information, visit www.pica8.com or follow @pica8 on Twitter.

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