Enterprise SONiC Distribution by Edgecore is a hardened, open distribution of SONiC (Soſtware for Open Networking in the Cloud) which runs on Edgecore Open Networking switches. The SONiC Community is led by Microsoſt and many key players, including Edgecore, to deliver a robust and proven soſtware infrastructure that enables customers to build highly portable, scalable data center networks.

Enterprise SONiC by Broadcom® is an open source network operating system based on Linux that runs on merchant silicon-based platforms. The open source SONiC project is available at GitHub (https://github.com/Azure/SONiC/wiki). Enterprise SONiC is a commercial offering based on open source SONiC with feature enrichment and hardening that is targeted at Data Center leaf, spine, and super-spine deployments. Enterprise SONiC supports ODM and OEM platforms based on the StrataXGS® family of silicon from Broadcom.

Data centers have moved from the enterprise to a cloud-based infrastructure, and from a physical sever being a unit of computing to a virtual machine (VM) as a unit of computing. From the VM technology has evolved the concept of cloud technology, which has virtualized the compute, networking and storage. All this technology enabled the leasing of VMs to customers for public cloud providers such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft etc. The advances of the hypervisor and cloud technology by the likes of VMware, Xen, and the KVM community made this possible.

Network physical layer connectivity with optical cables using the breakout mode has become increasingly very important as new high-speed ports become available on network L2 switches, L3 routers, and other types of communication equipment. Dynamic breakout allows high-speed ports to connect and interface with lowerspeed ports, as shown in Figure 1.

The intended audience for this white paper is familiar with networking terms and may refer to the “Network Definitions White Paper” for additional information. Next, one may also read the companion white papers titled “BGP EVPN VXLAN” and “Multi Chassis Link Aggregation with Active-Standby”. All the aforementioned documents are part of the meta paper, “BGP-EVPN-VXLAN-MC-LAG White Paper”. Ethernet Virtual Private Network (EVPN) has the following homing modes for connection between Provider Edge (PE) and Customer Edge (CE) devices:

Static Anycast Gateway for EVPN/VXLAN is a default IP gateway addressing mechanism that enables the use of the same VLAN and the same gateway IP and MAC addresses across all the leaf switches that are part of the same L3 VNI in a VXLAN network.

VLAN – Virtual Local Area Network is a technique of isolating LANs based on the 802.1Q standard with a 16-bit protocol identifier tag and a 16-bit control information tag, which is broken further into a 12-bit VLAN identifier, 3-bit 802.1p-based priority code point, and 1-bit 802.1Q-based drop eligible indicator (indicating congestion). Leaf-and-Spine Network – It is a two-tiered tree-like structure, as shown in the Figure 2, with a leaf layer and a spine layer. One can think of the access and south-bound aggregation layers merging to become the leaf layer and the core and north-bound aggregation layers merging to become the spine layer. This is how a Data Center (DC) Network looks.