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DENT Member Spotlight: Keysight Technologies

By Blog, Community News

This is the third blog in a series of posts highlighting members of the DENT Project. We continue with a spotlight on Keysight Technologies, as explained by Dean Lee, Senior Director of the Cloud Industry Solution Team at Keysight.

Please tell us a little about your organization:

We are the Network Test Solutions group within the Keysight organization. Our team builds Ethernet traffic generators and protocol emulators for the networking industry to validate the LAN, WAN and data centers deployed in enterprises, service providers and hyperscalers around the globe.

Why is your organization adopting a Network Operating System (NOS)?

We believe that the open architecture and collaboration among end users, ASIC, switches and test equipment vendors could truly benefit the networking industry and accelerate innovations.

Why did you join DENT, and what impact do you think DENT has on Network Operating Systems?

DENT, as an open source community, fully leverages the wide adoption of Linux into networking operating systems. Keysight has been a proponent of Open NOS and Open Traffic Generator. DENT aligns with our core competency and beliefs.

What do you see as the top benefits of being part of the DENT community?

Keysight has great opportunities to work with industry leaders in network architecture, ASIC and switch designs. We can collaborate and enhance our test capabilities with the DENT community.

What sort of contributions has your team made (or plans to make) to the DENT community?

Keysight provides expertise and test equipment in validating data centers deployed with DENT NOS. We also manage and house the community test lab, which provides the test pipeline for DENT NOS CI/CD.

What sets DENT apart from other industry alliances?

DENT is flexible and also specializes in retail, enterprise and campus networking. It covers the area not serviced by SONiC. Since it is a true Linux-based NOS, the deployment and management can be easily handled just like a Linux server.

How will DENT help your business?

We can leverage the test cases contributed by community members and share them with more Keysight test solution users.

What advice would you give to someone considering joining DENT?

DENT is the NOS for any applications outside core data centers. It is easy to deploy and adopt. Keysight provides a community test lab to assist PoC and vendor validation as a service. The onboarding of new use cases is easy with community support.

Keysight DENT Representatives:

Dean Lee, Senior Director, Cloud Industry Solution Team

Manodipto Ghose, Product Manager 

DENT Member Spotlight: Edgecore Networks

By Blog, Community News

This is the second in a series of posts highlighting members of the DENT Project. We continue with a spotlight on Edgecore Networks, as explained by Edgecore Networks’ Head of Engineering Larry Ho.

Please tell us a little about your organization:
Back in 2020 when Edgecore joined DENT as a founding member, we were convinced that open source NOS, like dentOS, can play a key role in the next-generation technologies of open networking. Obviously, we still are as of today. A key component of Edgecore’s solution is an open source NOS.

Why did you join DENT, and what impact do you think DENT has on Network Operating Systems?
When Edgecore joined DENT, it was the only open source NOS that was architected and designed for enterprise edge and retail. Today, it remains the only NOS that is dedicated to this space.

What do you see as the top benefits of being part of the DENT community?
Since 2021, there has been growing interest by operators in enterprise edge and retail domains to deploy Open Source software. DENT is a proven technology in deploying to retail stores. Its community plays a pivotal role in ramping up DENT and its related technologies. It also serves as the messenger to educate operators who may be interested in DENT.

What sort of contributions has your team made (or plans to make) to the DENT community?
Edgecore started as a switch hardware contributor. While we plan to continue contributions in this area, we also participated in DENT’s test subgroup to help solidify DENT’s community development and testing infrastructures and processes. Edgecore was also instrumental in supporting DENT to adopt SAI in 2022. If and when DENT adopts switch hardware based on Broadcom’s silicon, we will look at opportunities for SAI contributions. 

What sets DENT apart from other industry alliances?
DENT is now a 4+ years open source project. It is still gathering participation and interest. During this journey, DENT has shown its willingness to adjust from its original purely switchdev base architecture to include a SAI base architecture. In Edgecore’s view, SAI will increase the choices of silicon and switching platforms available which is key to DENT’s ultimate goal: broad commercial deployment. 

How will DENT help your business?
A key element of Edgecore’s solution is open source NOS.

What advice would you give to someone considering joining DENT?
Like any open source community, there are several key factors to ensure its success. One is broad deployment in commercial environment: adoption; The other is continuous evolution of its technologies with contributions from broad segments of the community. There are actually more factors. Joining DENT implies you are preparing to help in one or more of these factors.

Edgecore Networks DENT Representatives:

Nanda Ravindran, Vice President of Product Management

William Chiang, Project Software Manager

 

 

Amazon

DENT Member Spotlight: AWS

By Blog

This is the first in a new series of posts highlighting members of the DENT Project. We begin the series with a spotlight on Amazon Web Services (AWS), as explained by AWS Senior Product Manager Vincent Tong.

Please tell us a little about your organization:
We’re a team in AWS that is responsible for delivering networking services for both internal and external customers. The network services include LAN, Wi-Fi and WAN installation, provisioning, monitoring and remediation.

Why is your organization adopting a Network Operating System (NOS)?
We needed a NOS that we could develop, fix bugs and roll out new releases on for the 48x1G switches, that are part of the Just Walk Out solution. AWS had previously used third party NOS but had issues with the availability and timing of new releases to deliver new features or fix bugs.

Why did you join DENT, and what impact do you think DENT has on Network Operating Systems?
AWS joined DENT because there were no viable open source NOS for Enterprise applications at that time. Today, AWS is deploying DENT at scale in switches, wireless base stations, and entry/exit gates.

What do you see as the top benefits of being part of the DENT community?
Being part of the DENT community has allowed AWS to collaborate with leading silicon vendors, original device manufacturers, software developers, and test vendors to create an ecosystem for Enterprise Edge applications.

What sort of contributions has your team made (or plans to make) to the DENT community?
AWS has taken leadership positions in the DENT Board of Directors, Technical Steering Committee (TSC) and Marketing Committee. In 2023, AWS obtained speaking slots in several conferences in US, Canada and Europe to promote DENT. In addition, AWS has upstreamed test cases and POE code for dentOS.

What sets DENT apart from other industry alliances?
DENT is different from other open source NOS like SONiC because it is focused on Linux. Developers will be able to use the same Linux tools that they normally use to develop and deploy dentOS.

How will DENT help your business?
DENT has helped AWS move quickly to develop new features, fix bugs and roll out new releases with the support of other DENT members. The addition of SAI support within dentOS will allow AWS to widen the range of hardware platforms that can use dentOS.

What advice would you give to someone considering joining DENT?
Participate in the different DENT user group forums (https://lists.dent.dev/g/main) like the TSC, Features working group or Marketing working group to check out DENT at no cost. This will allow you to quickly make an evaluation and decide if DENT is right for you.