The DENT Project Continues to Accelerate Retail Market Momentum with the Launch of DENT 3.2 “Cynthia” and New Industry- Leading New General Members

DENT to showcase latest release and the evolution of the DENT network operating system at DENT Mini-Summit onsite at the 2023 OCP Global Summit  

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – October 27, 2023 — The DENT Project, which revolutionizes the networking landscape through the utilization of the Linux Kernel, Switchdev, and other Linux-based projects, announced today the launch of DENT 3.2 “Cynthia.” Additionally, the project has added four new general members: BISDN, Bootlin, PLVision and Wistron.

With the latest releases of DentOS 3.1 and 3.2, DentOS Cynthia represents significant enhancements with robust quality improvements, new features, and functionality.

“DENT continues to evolve its role as a leader in the open source NOS ecosystem. New member growth and the latest release help foster DENT’s diverse and inclusive ecosystem that thrives on collaboration and cutting-edge innovation,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge, and IoT, the Linux Foundation. “With the new Cynthia release, access to and experimentation with DENT is even easier and more accessible, allowing users to also manage costs and improve network security and performance.”

“Cynthia” Key Highlights:

• Hardened test regression and automated CI/CD pipeline to cover more comprehensive functional testing in QoS, 802.1x, IPv6, IGMP, ECMP, LACP, LLDP, RSTP and VRRP, all of which are essential for building reliable and scalable network infrastructures.
• Upgrade of DentOS to Debian 10 LTS: allowing DENT to leverage the latest Linux features, bug fixes, and security updates.
• Newly-enabled virtualization support: allowing users to run DentOS on virtual machines (VMs) without requiring physical hardware, thus making it easier for new users, educational institutions, and Linux enthusiasts to try out DentOS and experiment with network switching capabilities.
• Enabled Virtual Routing and Forwarding (VRF): allowing DentOS users to create multiple routing tables on a single device, thus enabling network segmentation and isolation, which can reduce deployment and management costs, and improve network security and performance.
• Addition of TN48M2-SWDEV: from Delta Electronics, one of DENT’s premier members, they were able to add support for a new platform to their list of supported devices. This platform is a 48-port 10G switch with 6 40G uplinks, making it ideal for a wide range of networking operations.

“Amazon uses DENT open-source platforms and software to power its networking infrastructure to enable customers to skip check-out lines with our Just Walk Out Technology. We are pleased to see the DENT community’s dedication to enhance enterprise networking with new production quality features with deployability in the forefront of the community’s each release principals.” said Jason Long, Director of Networking for AWS Applications and chairman of the DENT Board. “A ready to deploy DENT enables us to utilize new hardware and software quickly and efficiently, reduce our networking costs by giving us access to open-source switches, and thus reduce our dependency on proprietary (and costly) networking solutions.”

“The DENT functional and system integration test framework powered by the Keysight IxNetwork test system has been expanded to include hundreds of test cases and full integration with the community CI/CD test pipeline. The end result is significant improvement in test regression and quality,” said Dean Lee, Senior Director Cloud Solution Team at Keysight Technologies. “It is great to see that the robustness and maturity of DentOS is now fully ready for enterprise deployment.” 

Welcome New Members

With the addition of BISDN, Bootlin, PLVision, and Wistron, these four organizations will now be joining the existing DENT general members Keysight Technologies, Micas Networks, and Sartura, alongside premier members Amazon.com, Delta Electronics, Edgecore Networks, and Marvell. Each of these organizations bring their distinct industry expertise that continually strengthens the diversity of the project.

 DENT Mini Summit at OCP Global Summit 

The project hosted a Mini-Summit at the Open Compute Project Global Summit on October 18, 2023, to help showcase why the project continues to attract leading organizations and end users. The event was free to attend with main OCP Global Summit registration. DENT also had a booth throughout the duration of the OCP Global Summit (October 17-19, 2023) where they exhibited how DENT was enabling the evolution of disaggregated enterprise networking with Linux.  

New Member Support:

“We share the vision of the DENT project that the standardization of drivers, APIs and technologies, as well as working with upstream open-source projects, is the right direction for the networking ecosystem. We’re excited to become a general member of the DENT project and contribute to the project's success by sharing our deep expertise in upstream Linux kernel development” said Thomas Petazzoni, CEO at Bootlin, a company which offers broad embedded Linux experience through its engineering and training services.

“Micas expects to leverage its resources and experiences of Open Software development to fully support Amazon.com's Enterprise Edge Gateway by co-designing the product,” said Kevin Yao, Senior Director of Strategy at Micas Networks, which focuses on designing and manufacturing open network equipment. “DENT will bring improved quality and security to enterprise edge networks.”

“We are excited to join the DENT Project as the general member and having PLVision's leading expert elected as the Governing Board Representative. With our deep expertise in top switch silicon and wealth of experience developing products based on open network operating systems including DentOS, PLVision is eager to contribute to DENT's collaborative ecosystem in order to help revolutionize the way networks are deployed and managed,” said Olena Kozlova, CEO at PLVision, which builds custom networking products based on open software enabling faster innovation for solution vendors, service providers and enterprises.

Additional Resources:

• To learn more about becoming a member of The DENT Project, visit: https://dent.dev/join/.
• To download and start testing DENT 3.2 today, visit: https://github.com/dentproject/dentOS.
• To join DENT technical working groups, visit:

https://lists.dent.dev/g/tsc/calendar.

• To register for the 2023 OCP Global Summit visit:

https://2023ocpglobal.fnvirtual.app/