Nokia brings SONiC support, automation to its data center switching portfolio.

Nokia is offering customers an alternative way to set up data center networks by expanding its data center fabric package to support the open-source Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC).

Being developed under the Linux Foundation, SONiC was created by Microsoft for its Azure data centers and then open-sourced by Microsoft in 2017. The SONiC community has grown significantly since and now features some 4,000 contributors and 28 paying members.

Linux-based SONiC decouples network software from the underlying hardware and lets it run on hundreds of switches and ASICs from multiple vendors while supporting a full suite of network features such as Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), remote direct memory access (RDMA), QoS, and Ethernet/IP.