
Stratum is an open source, silicon-independent switch operating system for software-defined networks that runs on a variety of switching silicon and various whitebox switch platforms.

The ONF’s Stratum SDN project has been released as open source under the Apache 2.0 open source license. This converged design enables operators to deploy simpler solutions at a much lower cost, both in terms of Capex and Opex. The four Cassini systems replace what would otherwise be 8 distinct devices: 4 spine switches and 4 packet optical transponder systems. It can serve both as a spine for “leaf-spine” type architectures within the datacenter, and as a packet optical transponder for the inter-datacenter connections. The demonstration leveraged the open source ONOS control plane from ONF and the open hardware from TIP it also relied on proprietary embedded software running on the Cassini platform.

The ONF notes that its ODTN project has already demonstrated end-to-end orchestration of a network of Cassini-based systems in field trials. Stratum on Cassini now enables a completely open SDN-native solution for addressing Data Center Interconnect (DCI) use cases. These new capabilities enable Stratum to be deployed on the white box Cassini platform.

Stratum’s capabilities have now been extended to support configuration and management of optical parameters including wavelength, modulation and optical power. Stratum is a thin switch OS for data center white box switches supporting SDN interfaces, including P4, P4Runtime, gNMI and OpenConfig. Stratum, the open-source switch operating system software developed by the ONF, is now available on Cassini packet optical transport hardware from TIP.Ĭassini is a network switching platform with integrated optical transponders that is developed as a project by the Telecom Infra Project (TIP).
