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Dell Technologies is an early pioneer in data center network fabrics and offers solutions that maximize customer choice, innovation, flexibility, and lower costs. The open solutions enable customers to simplify their data center networking through complete disaggregation. Dell Networking believes that our open network solutions simulate rapid innovation by helping our customers achieve unprecedented levels of flexibility and efficiency. Dell Technologies provides further customer enablement through validated deployment guides that demonstrate these benefits while maintaining a high standard of quality, consistency, and support.
Open solutions prove to be the best solutions, as they provide choice, flexibility and do not need to be constrained by propriety software. However, for Ethernet switches, there are few open network operating systems (NOS). Customers want to build and manage high-performance, highly scalable, and highly available data centers. The main requirements for their needs are:
SONiC, which is an acronym for “software for open networking in the cloud”, is an open-source network operating system based on Debian Linux that runs on switches from multiple vendors. SONiC offers a full feature set that has been in use in the data centers of some of the largest cloud service providers. Because it is open-source, SONiC helps users use the collective strength and take advantage of the vast ecosystem and community.
Enterprise SONiC Distribution by Dell Technologies helps IT organizations run their businesses with the innovation, automation, and reliability that comes from a commercial offering based on the open-source SONiC operating system. It includes feature enhancements and hardening targeted for demanding data center leaf and spine fabrics while maintaining the open-source spirit.
Customers not only benefit from Dell Technologies enhancements, including hardening and validation of enterprise-ready data center fabric use cases, but also the support of select Dell PowerSwitch family of industry-leading open networking switches. Customers can take full advantage of around-the-clock, consistent, single-source support offered in 165 countries with over 60,000 Dell Technologies and partner professionals. Dell Technologies also provides an innovative cloud network life solution that automates and simplifies the design, deployment, and assurance of network services in the cloud, built around customers’ specific needs. These features help customers improve network availability, monitoring, resiliency, security, and scalability throughout the network.
Enterprise SONiC Edge network deployments change at a rapid pace. IT managers must support an increasing variety of users and devices throughout their organizations. Simultaneously, they must adapt their networks to address the needs of key business functions while providing reliability, performance, and flexibility.
Today’s businesses require networks to provide reliable high-performance wired and wireless connectivity. These networks must be capable of delivering rich applications and access to corporate resources regardless of device form factors.
In addition, business owners today ask their IT staff to be more agile by delivering network access in shorter deployment times with fewer resources.
This guide provides an example of the steps to deploy the Enterprise SONiC Edge Bundle at a retail edge location. Multiple control plane protocols of choice can be used. VXLAN BGP EVPN is chosen as it is flexible and fits solutions that require L2 connectivity on an L3 underlay on Leaf-Spine networks that are building blocks of modern data centers. These can support myriad of use cases.
The CLI and UI examples in this document use the following conventions:
Monospace Text CLI examples
Underlined Monospace Text CLI examples that wrap the page
Italic Monospace Text Variables in CLI examples
Bold Monospace Text Commands entered at the CLI prompt, or to highlight information in CLI output
Bold text UI elements and information entered in the UI