Open Network Featured Article

The open commoditization of the data center is continuing apace, with an almost wholesale movement toward using white-box hardware to run virtualized functions and software-defined processes. In an ancillary trend, the networking software stack itself is starting to be opened up and disaggregated—a phenomenon that Dell (News - Alert) hopes to address with a new networking OS.

There’s a reason of course that hyperscalers and the like are taking over the data center—abstraction provides cost efficiencies and, in theory, allows better management and more rapid resource allocation. So much so, in fact, that in a fully open environment, network resources can be spun up and put into use on the fly.

“We are well down the path,” Jeff Baher, senior director of technical marketing for Dell’s networking division, said in a recent interview. “We are at the beginning of a ten-year to fifteen-year transition that is similar to the transition from mainframes to client/server, where we saw the disaggregation of elements of the mainframe – CPUs, operating systems, middleware, virtualization and the applications that ride on top of them.”

Now, the same trends are affecting the networking stack. Complex networking devices, such as high-end, proprietary routers, have close linkages between the hardware and the software that runs them. But, Linux-based network operating systems such as the Extensible Operating System from Arista, OpenNetLinux from Big Switch, PicaOS from Pica8, Cumulus Linux from Cumulus Networks and OpenSwitch from Hewlett Packard Enterprise provide switch environments based on fixed form factors and merchant silicon, which are much easier to open up.

“The software requirements for switching are pretty well known, and as a result, switching is a better candidate for this level of disruption,” Baher said, adding that more than 400 of Dell’s customers have started down the open networking road.

To dovetail with the trend, Dell is creating the OS10, which will be the operating system that it will use on its campus and datacenter switches, replacing the monolithic OS9 and OS6 software. It uses a Debian Linux kernel called OS10 Base and runs on merchant networking ASICs.

OS10 Base has been hardened for networking with Control Plane Services (CPS) APIs above it and platform abstraction services through the Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI (News - Alert)) layer. OS10 Base is in beta now, and will be production grade by March.

As far as how open-source the offering is, OS10 Base is freely distributed by Dell, but it isn’t planning to open-source the base stack, Baher said. The CPS control plane layer meanwhile may be contributed back to the community he said. And SAI is an open specification already -- Dell and Microsoft (News - Alert) created it together and open-sourced through the Open Compute Project last year.

Dell is also working on the OS10 Premium package, which will go into beta in March with production scheduled for the summer. It adds some bells and whistles, including the Layer 2 and Layer 3 switching and routing protocols that are bundled inside of Dell’s existing OS for datacenter and campus switches. It will also have management tools and policy controls that determine how Ethernet traffic is shaped as it flows through the switch.