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The SONiC Revolution: Open Networking Changed Switching Forever
Over the past decade, open network operating systems represented by SONiC have fundamentally reshaped the Ethernet switch market. With its core principles of open architecture, flexible deployment, and vendor-neutral design, SONiC has empowered countless organizations to break free from the constraints of traditional closed networking, unleashing a wave of unprecedented innovation.
However, the open networking revolution has yet to truly take hold in the router space. To this day, the market still lacks a truly commercial-ready, mature, and user-friendly open-source routing solution that can challenge the long-dominant closed-box architectures. At Asterfusion, we believe routers deserve the same level of transformation.
Asterfusion’s Journey: From Switch Innovation to Router Disruption
Since 2017, we have been actively developing our own SONiC-based operating system to deliver a turnkey open networking solution. Our extensive product portfolio spans from data centers to campus networks, offering switches with port speeds ranging from 1G to 800G. As industry pioneers, we have deployed our enterprise SONiC NOS not only in data center switches but also on Layer 2 campus access switches, demonstrating our commitment to innovation and practical adoption.
Yet, our journey didn’t stop there. After successfully productizing and commercializing SONiC on white-box switches, Asterfusion is now setting its sights on the future—building the next-generation SONiC-based white-box router platform, with a forward-looking vision and unwavering investment.
One Unified Vision: Seamless Experience Across Switching and Routing
Our mission is clear: to extend the openness, flexibility, and unified experience that SONiC has brought to the switching world seamlessly into the realm of routing. From user experience, management workflows, and operational processes to commercial delivery models, our goal is to build an open networking platform where switching and routing architectures are aligned—and the experience is consistent.
By integrating our data center-proven, high-performance network protocol stack with the SONiC operating system’s streamlined experience, and bringing it into the VPP data plane, we are enabling general-purpose servers to power a fully open routing platform.
Today, enterprises can not only deploy Asterfusion SONiC white-box switches on Broadcom and Marvell chipsets, but also achieve the same stable, elegant, and open-source enterprise-grade routing capabilities on general-purpose servers or DPUs.
This marks the beginning of a new era. Organizations looking to break free from closed routing systems, build in-house capabilities, or gain more flexibility and cost-efficiency finally have a trustworthy choice: a stable, high-performance, open, and unified SONiC-based routing platform.
Powering Open Routing: From ASICs to Servers and DPUs
From a hardware perspective, the industry already has a solid foundation: powerful infrastructure platforms such as Marvell Octeon DPUs, NVIDIA BlueField DPUs, virtualization platforms, and high-performance general-purpose servers.
On the software side, mature high-performance data planes like VPP have laid the groundwork for building a truly open routing platform.
The challenge? There is still no commercially available routing platform that effectively integrates these hardware and software capabilities into a cohesive, deployable solution.
This is precisely where Asterfusion comes in.
SONiC-VPP: The Technology Behind Our Open Routing Breakthrough
By encapsulating the SAI interface on top of VPP, we have successfully extended our mature commercial SONiC distribution—AsterNOS—from traditional switching silicon to server and DPU platforms, complete with full routing protocol support.
This innovation not only expands the application boundaries of SONiC, but also provides a truly viable technical path to bring open routing into real-world deployment.
Asterfusion is driving the evolution of open networking—from “switchable” to routable—leading a full-stack, full-scenario transformation from switching to routing.
ET SONiC Routers Powered by SONiC+VPP : Built for the Edge, Backbone, and Beyond
Asterfusion’s Marvell Octeon 10 DPU-based ET Series Routers/Gateways are exactly such solutions—next-generation open networking platforms designed for the future. They are built on the Marvell OCTEON 10 DPU architecture and powered by Asterfusion’s self-developed SONiC-VPP network operating system, delivering a future-ready open routing platform. They are designed for key use cases such as enterprise network egress, north-south traffic in data centers, and service provider edge deployments.
Select models like the ET3600 support up to two Marvell OCTEON 10 CN103XX DPUs, each equipped with an 8-core ARM Neoverse N2 processor, capable of:
- Up to 100Gbps full-duplex data throughput
- 80Gbps hardware-accelerated encryption
This enables high-performance packet forwarding while maintaining excellent energy efficiency—ideal for edge deployments that demand robust compute, secure processing, and integrated networking capabilities.
At the heart of the ET Series is the SONiC-VPP platform—Asterfusion’s enterprise-grade routing OS that seamlessly integrates the flexible SONiC control plane with the high-speed VPP (Vector Packet Processing) data plane. This combination delivers high throughput and comprehensive protocol stack support.
Key features include:
- Support for mainstream routing protocols such as BGP and OSPF
- Built-in support for IPSec VPN, NAT, ACLs, and QoS
- Compatibility with RoCE, telemetry, and SPAN/ERSPAN monitoring frameworks
- Support Virtual Router
In addition, SONiC-VPP is highly adaptable—it runs across x86 and ARM architectures and supports containerized or virtualized environments, offering users an open, programmable, and future-proof network infrastructure platform.
👇 [Click to view the full routing feature list]
Ready for the Future: Asterfusion’s Vision for Open Routing Infrastructure
With the launch of the Marvell Octeon 10 DPU-ET series and the innovative SONiC-VPP operating system, Asterfusion is not only expanding the boundaries of SONiC, but also accelerating the industry’s transition toward a truly open, unified, and high-performance routing infrastructure.
Whether you’re building scalable enterprise edge networks, modernizing carrier backbones, or architecting cloud-ready data centers, Asterfusion offers a compelling alternative to legacy closed systems—open, efficient, and built for the future.
The current hardware product of ET3600 series will be launched in early August 2025, and the integrated hardware-software solution will be launched in early September.
Ready to learn more? Contact us today to explore how SONiC-VPP can power your next-generation routing platform.
