Redwood City, CA and Interop Las Vegas, March 31 - Aricent, a premier engineering services and software company, today announced its advanced Software Defined Network (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) software based on Intel reference design hardware. Aricent’s SDN and NFV software is ported to Intel’s Open Network Platform (ONP) Switch Reference Design, and is now available for customer trials. The next generation solution will help Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and Original Design Manufacturers (ODMs) to quickly build high performance datacenter switches including top of the rack (ToR) switches, blade switches, and other hardware accelerated datacenter fabric switches.

Intel’s Open Network Platform (ONP) Switch Reference Design is designed for emerging SDN and NFV switching and routing requirements. It is based on the Intel® Xeon® processor and Intel Ethernet Switch FM6764.

Aricent’s comprehensive software suite for SDN architectures includes - Layer 2 switching suite including Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN), Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) and Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP); Layer 3 routing suite including Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) and Intermediate System to Intermediate System (IS-IS) protocols, Border Gateway Protocol (BGP); and the Openflow data plane software running on the Intel Ethernet Switch FM6764 and Intel Xeon processor.

“We are delighted to introduce our SDN and NFV software on Intel’s reference design,” said Sridhar Raju, assistant vice president at Aricent.  “The solution will help OEMs and ODMs to quickly introduce new and advanced switching solutions for the SDN and NFV market, while reducing their R&D costs significantly.”

“The Intel ONP switch reference design provides a high performance and scalable platform for software partners such as Aricent to innovate on for multiple switch form factors”, said Rene Torres, Director of Marketing for Intel’s Software Defined Networking Division.  “Aricent’s software suite running on top of Intel’s reference design can accelerate the path to market for OEMs and ODMs looking to deploy SDN and NFV solutions.”

In another development, Aricent announced the availability of its performance optimized, ready to deploy datacenter network operating system (OS) on Intel Ethernet Switch FM6764 chip based datacenter switch hardware. It is a full featured, robust network OS for high capacity datacenter switches. Aricent’s network OS offers flexibility, compelling features, and the performance needed for next generation datacenter switches in SDN architectures.  Aricent has also become a part of the Intel Network Builders ecosystem program which is focused on accelerating SDN and NFV solutions in the market.