Dive into Asterfusion Enterprise SONiC Distribution: What Sets It Apart from Community SONiC?

Why Embrace SONiC and Open Networking?

As cloud computing, AI, and data centers continue to evolve, traditional closed network architectures can no longer meet the new generation of networking’s demands for openness, flexibility, and programmability. Open networking has steadily become the industry’s mainstream direction.

Our founder, Ricardo, previously led the development of Huawei’s first-generation switch operating system and deeply understands the limitations of legacy network architectures. In 2017, he joined forces with several senior technology executives from Huawei, H3C, and Cisco to found Asterfusion, determined to ride the wave of open networking and lead innovation in this field.

We started as active contributors to the SONiC community, gradually honing an enterprise-grade commercial version and building a complete hardware-software integrated solution based on SONiC. This solution addresses diverse networking needs, spanning data centers to campus networks, and cloud to edge environments.

We believe that open networking will become the foundation of future infrastructure, and our mission is clear:

Supercharging SONiC: Easier to Use, Ready for Everywhere –Asterfusion is on a mission to build the world’s most powerful, intuitive, and widely deployed SONiC-based open switches and routers.

Bringing SONiC to Life: Making Open Networking Truly Production-Ready

If joining the SONiC community was initially an idealistic technical choice, in the years since, we have proven through sustained investment and productization that open-source networking can be truly production-ready and deployable.

Bringing Enterprise SONiC to Campus Networks

A landmark moment came in Q4 2022: We became one of the industry’s earliest vendors to introduce SONiC’s architecture and philosophy into our campus switch product line- CX-M, achieving true campus-grade SONiC deployments. This was more than just “swapping the OS” — it was a deep integration and system-level re-architecture. We ported and optimized SONiC for hardware platforms with constrained resources, such as the Marvell AC5X/AC5Y platforms with 1G access ports. As a result, we extended SONiC’s core principles — openness, ease of use, and flexibility — from the data center all the way to campus networks.

Beyond robust L2/L3 capabilities, most of our models also support:

• VXLAN and BGP-EVPN virtualization for flexible logical network orchestration.
• MPLS on select models, enabling seamless WAN integration for carrier-grade scenarios.
• PTP (Precision Time Protocol) on select models, delivering precision time-sensitive networking for critical applications.

This new generation of campus switches doesn’t just offer strong protocol support; they also embody our consistent product philosophy: preloaded proprietary hardware and an independently developed SONiC-based commercial OS, delivering integrated software and hardware.

More importantly, we’ve built a comprehensive open campus networking solution:

• Seamlessly integrated with our OpenWiFi Controller and OpenWiFi APs
• Fully visualized, automated, and open management from wireless to access to core
• A truly end-to-end open networking solution across Wireless, Access, and Core

These efforts have allowed us to achieve a rare balance: A perfect harmony of openness, agility, high performance, and cost-efficiency.

Beyond Switching: Leading the New Era of SONiC-based White-box Routers

The advent of SONiC fundamentally reshaped the landscape of switch ecosystems. We believe that routers deserve the same transformation.

After successfully productizing SONiC for white-box switches, we didn’t stop there. We have pressed ahead to create the next generation of SONiC-based white-box routers. Our goal is to bring SONiC’s strengths — openness, flexibility, and vendor lock-in avoidance — seamlessly to routing as well. From user experience to management, usage flow to business models, everything remains unified, ensuring a consistent architecture and experience across switching and routing.

From a hardware perspective, the industry now has robust foundational platforms — including the Marvell Octeon DPU, NVIDIA BlueField DPU, and high-performance servers or virtualization hosts. On the software side, data plane solutions like VPP have matured significantly. Together, these provide a solid foundation for building an open routing platform.

Yet, SONiC still struggles to provide full routing functionality on these new platforms. There’s a notable gap in the market for a commercial-grade, mature, and user-friendly open routing solution that can truly replace expensive, closed black-box routers.

The industry urgently needs a turnkey routing platform that integrates high-performance servers or DPUs, mainstream data planes (like VPP), and open-source control planes — a solution that’s truly deployable and ready to plug and play.

And that’s exactly what Asterfusion is delivering.

We have integrated the SAI interface onto VPP, enabling our stable, mature SONiC distribution — AsterNOS Edge edition— to expand beyond traditional Broadcom and Marvell switch ASIC platforms to DPU and server platforms with full routing capabilities.

This not only unlocks new deployment scenarios for SONiC but also provides a truly viable, deployable platform for open networking in the routing space. Asterfusion is actively driving the evolution of open networking from “switching only” to full “switching + routing” coverage.

The Asterfusion Marvell Octeon 10 DPU-ET series routers/gateways embody this vision. Equipped with our in-house SONiC-VPP operating system, they’re purpose-built for large-scale enterprise edge, carrier backbone, and data center applications — a next-generation open networking platform designed for the future.

[Below to view the router software feature lists]

Integrating Network Packet Broker Functionality into SONiC

We have also integrated Network Packet Broker (NPB) functionality directly into SONiC. Specifically, SONiC’s traffic collection capabilities are enhanced by installing the APP-PB extension. By deploying a Packet Broker Docker container within SONiC and adding new NPB containers, we can significantly strengthen the traffic collection capabilities on top of existing switch services.

As a result, our SONiC-based CX-M campus switches fully leverage SONiC’s open container architecture, seamlessly embedding packet broker features into a single container. This innovative integration unlocks advanced features including traffic mirroring, raw data tagging, filtering, aggregation, preprocessing, load balancing, and output replication. It can operate as a L2/L3 switch, as a packet broker for traffic monitoring, or even as both simultaneously — all on demand. This enables comprehensive NPB monitoring capabilities to run directly on the switch, dramatically reducing overall costs.

Eight Years of Pioneering Innovation for theree Edition Enterprise SONiC Distribution

For past eight years, Asterfusion has remained at the forefront of open networking, committed to building the world’s most professional SONiC engineering team. Today, with over 120 seasoned SONiC engineers, we have assembled one of the largest and most deployment-savvy technical forces globally.

We’re not just “working with SONiC”—we’re redefining the future of networking with SONiC at the core.

Our product lineup spans from 1G campus access switches to 800G AI ultra-low latency switches, edge routers, and Packet Brokers—each powered by our independently developed and continually evolving enterprise-grade SONiC operating system: AsterNOS.

To ensure the best experience across different scenarios, we’ve extended AsterNOS into three distinct versions:

SONiC Data Center & AI Networking Edition:

Empowering the CX-N series to tackle AI-driven and traditional data center environments, and hyperscale clusters. (Click to preview and download)

SONiC Campus Networking:

Powering the CX-M series to deliver secure, stable, and intelligent enterprise access networks.

(Click to preview and download)

SONiC Routing Edition

Running on cutting-edge platforms built on Marvell DPU Platform, directly challenging traditional black-box routers! (Click to preview and download)

Our products are trusted in real-world deployments—ranging from carrier backbone networks and large internet companies to top-tier hospitals, enterprise campuses, and private clouds—constantly refined and battle-tested to ensure maturity and reliability.

Today, we’re not just staunch advocates of SONiC; we’re pioneers driving the commercial adoption of open networking.

We proudly declare: Asterfusion is one of the most professional and battle-ready SONiC teams in the world, leading this networking revolution.

What Sets Asterfusion’s Commercial SONiC Apart from the Community SONiC?

This is one of the most common questions we hear from our customers. In short:

AsterNOS is a “ready-for-production” enterprise-grade SONiC distribution, purpose-built for campus networks, large-scale data centers, AI/HPC environments, and edge routing applications. It offers complete functionality, continuous updates, and comprehensive technical support—truly enterprise-ready.

Key Advantages of AsterNOS:

• Plug-and-play: No need for custom builds or manual tuning. It’s ready to go—fast and reliable.
• Continuous evolution: Quarterly releases bring new features, enhanced compatibility, and stronger performance.
• Professional support: From pre-sales architecture consulting to post-sales technical response, we provide end-to-end support.
• Dual-mode CLI: Supports Cisco-style Klish and Linux-style Bash interfaces, seamlessly bridging traditional network engineering workflows.
• Multi-scenario coverage: Pre-installed on our full range of hardware—campus switches, data center switches, AI switches, and edge routers—supporting 1G to 800G deployments.
• Multi-platform support: Fully compatible with platforms including Marvell, Broadcom, Intel, P4, and x86.