The Open Network Install Environment (ONIE) is an open-source project within the Open Computer Project that provides an installation environment for bare-metal networking switches. Open Networking disaggregates the hardware from the operating system, giving you the choice of picking the network operating system that best fits your unique network infrastructure needs. Open Networking is achieved by using standards-based building blocks that use open source where possible.
ONIE provides the option to install different network operating systems on a common set of networking hardware. ONIE is like any operating system boot loader for Windows or Linux and uses the same GRand Unified Bootloader (GRUB) structure that is commonly found in Linux distributions.
In the Dell EMC PowerSwitch portfolio, any switch model with an “-ON” suffix, such as the PowerSwitch Z9264F-ON and PowerSwitch S5232-ON switches, has ONIE enabled. For information about ONIE, see http://onie.org/.
