OpenSwitch (OPX) announced the availability of a new software release today and welcomed new project members to its ecosystem.

OpenSwitch, which is a project under the Linux Foundation's umbrella, was designed as a switching software platform based on the OPX open source network operating system (NOS). OpenSwitch's new OPX 2.3 software is an enterprise-grade composable networking solution for white-box switches. The latest version includes enhanced automation capabilities and extended OPX compatibility to new families of hardware platforms.  

OpenSwitch mirrors the business and cost models for white-box hardware and disaggregated software that have been used with routers and in compute environments.  

"So in essence what we are trying to do over here at OpenSwitch is follow the server model," said Alley Hasan, OpenSwitch's governing board chair, in an interview with FierceTelecom. "In the server world, you have the server and the operating system and then the application residing on top. The operating system more often than not is Linux or Windows, and that is our vision of how the networking world should evolve. With OpenSwitch you have a standard operating system like Linux and then applications coming on top.  

"We went down the path of making it more consumable by adding more platforms to it. Towards the early part of this year we introduced the concept of micro features on OpenSwitch, which is in essence just disaggregating the software stack."