IP Infusion Unveils OcNOS, Full-Featured Network Operating System, to Accelerate Adoption of Open Compute Project

April 15, 2015 Off By David
Object Storage
Grazed from IP Infusion.

IP Infusion, Inc., a leading provider of intelligent network software for telecom and data communications services, today unveiled OcNOS™, the first, full-featured network operating system for data center and enterprise networking, including advanced capabilities such as extensive protocol support for MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching). OcNOS brings the power of the Open Compute Project, an open hardware movement and foundation, to data networking to reduce operational complexity.

Enterprises and service providers operating modern data centers need to create an infrastructure that has higher capacity, is less complex, and allows for fast and affordable addition of standard and new services. They require an approach that supports new, more fluid application architectures with greater agility and efficiency. Flexible programmable network is vital in providing service agility. Incumbent networking solutions are generally proprietary in nature with an emphasis on tight integration between custom hardware and software, leading to network solutions that are expensive, complex, without common management toolkits to orchestrate, automate, administer, operate, monitor and maintain. This complexity at the management plane, leads to increased vulnerability to both systems and operator errors, and high CapEx and OpEx cost structures.

OcNOS solves these problems by providing the crucial enterprise and carrier grade network operating system. Customers can take advantage of the price/performance of the “bare-metal” hardware as well as the agility and automation of the new generation of “software-defined” enterprise and data center software and the power of native Linux-based toolsets to create flexible network architectures.

“Today, enterprises with very large data centers need to lower their capital expenditures and operating costs, but they still need to keep their traditional networking components while they transition to new disruptive networking technologies, such as the Open Compute Project,” said Kiyo Oishi, CEO and president of IP Infusion. “OcNOS empowers customers to fulfill the promise of a software-defined network data center and represents a fundamental shift in how service providers will build their large-scale data centers with their specific requirements in mind without being locked in with one vendor.”

OcNOS, is a modular, multitasking networking operating system, that fills the void for an enterprise and service provider class standalone networking system that’s fast, easy, affordable, and gives network equipment manufacturers and network carriers the tight integration capabilities with commodity hardware they need to develop highly robust, scalable, redundant solutions that can be used in multiple deployment scenarios.

With the flexibility, extensive feature set, high degree of scalability and modularity that OcNOS offers, network carriers will be able to more easily implement large-scale IT deployments based on the Open Compute Project. Network providers also benefit from the robustness of an established operating system since OcNOS is built upon IP Infusion’s popular and proven ZebOS® line of networking products.

OcNOS gives its customers the foundation for a network that is much faster, simpler and more affordable that current solutions. Comments from some of the network hardware partners are as follows:

  • “In looking for an independent network operating system, we considered solutions that can scale to meet our customers’ needs for high-bandwidth connections between servers and automation to allow for scalability. By partnering with IP Infusion, we’re able to satisfy the growing requirements of today’s cloud computing customers who need to build a scalable data center network platform with Agema’s robust network switches and OcNOS without being tied to a proprietary switch operating system.” Jay Huang, President, Agema Systems, Inc. a leading open switch provider, http://agemasystems.com/
  • “Today’s new approaches in open networking, SDN, and NFV are enabling cloud service providers and enterprises to exploit next-generation data center designs that deliver more services, at lower costs, in faster timeframes. Accton is pleased to be collaborating with IP Infusion to offer customers the new OcNOS network operating system on Edge-Core’s open data center switches, as a robust, high function NOS for these new cloud infrastructures.” George Tchaparian, CEO, Edge-Core Networks, and GM, Data Center Networks, Accton Technology www.edge-core.com www.accton.com
  • “Interface Masters is excited to work with IP Infusion to provide a complete off the shelf production ready solution, where Interface Masters provides the leaf and spine hardware and IP Infusion provides the fully featured OcNOS networking software. With IP Infusion’s OcNOS and with a quality made in USA products hardware, Interface Masters is able to deliver a flexible switch that can be configured per the customers’ requirements at very attractive price per performance.” Ben Askarinam, Founder and CEO of Interface Masters www.interfacemasters.com

OcNOS brings support for:

  • Common software for multiple deployments and hardware — Designed using several inbuilt abstraction layers. These abstraction layers, allow the software to run over multiple control plane CPU and forwarding built with COTS (commercial off the shelf) hardware. It has been integrated and verified with multiple commodity hardware featuring a variety of control CPUs and data planes featuring multiple vendor ASICs and network processors, which provides network architects the key ability to design customizable seamless network built around multivendor hardware platforms.
  • Extensive protocol feature set: Built from the ground up, OcNOS delivers feature sets required for deployment in enterprise, campus, datacenters, carrier and mobile backhaul networks. The complete suite of Layer2, Layer3, MPLS, MPLS-TP and intermediate technologies allow for placement in legacy networks to green field deployments alike. The extensive control plane features have their pedigree in the four generations of proven widely deployed ZebOS product line.
  • Interoperation and ease of use: Built using standards based definitions, as well as popular vendor specific extensions, the operations, administration and management of OcNOS is provided using industry standard CLI, REST, NetCONF and SNMP, thus allowing the OcNOS based network devices to be easy to operate and interoperate with other vendor solutions. A fully transactional management plane allows network operators to quickly and inexpensively deliver comprehensive management capability for their complex network architectures. North bound and south bound APIs provide programmability for custom management solutions.
  • Modular software design: Designed as highly modular with multiple processes handing each individual key protocols and managed by a framework, allows for deployment in scaled and performance intensive deployments. Control and data plane separation allows for flexible scalable network device architecture.
  • Support for disruptive networking technologies: Supports technologies required for bisectional bandwidth scaling such as MLAG, SPB, TRILL, data center bridging, at data centers and interconnects. It supports technologies required for SDN, Hybrid SDN and distributed control plane and Network Functions Virtualization.
  • High Availability and Reliability: Provides standards based reliability and redundancy protocols like VRRP, BFD, Ring failure recovery protocols (protection switching), Data Center bridging, Traffic Engineering, Stateful Switch Over and Graceful Restart mechanisms to provide a guaranteed high availability, reliability and network level redundancy.

For more information on how IP Infusion is delivering on OcNOS, please visit IP Infusion’s website. IP Infusion will be demonstrating OcNOS at Interop on April 28 – 30, 2015 in Las Vegas at Booth #1163.