Deploying 10-000+ SONiC Switches: Broadcom's Data‑Center and Campus Transformation

Why It Matters

The rollout proves SONiC can meet enterprise scale‑up and campus needs, cutting vendor lock‑in and operational risk while enabling faster, safer upgrades. It signals a broader industry shift toward open networking and disaggregation for large data centers and corporate networks.

Summary

Broadcom replaced a legacy, proprietary three‑tier network with an open, SONiC‑based disaggregated architecture beginning in 2019, consolidating 16 data centers into seven and extending SONiC into campus and WAN environments. In their largest site they scaled from 600 to 1,400 racks and now run nearly 5,000 switches in a decentralized VXLAN fabric with VRFs, reducing single points of failure and enabling full‑DC upgrades with zero downtime. The deployment uses Broadcom silicon but emphasizes vendor‑agnostic NOS, security segmentation via VRFs and firewalling, and automation to support a lean operations team. The design prioritizes simplicity and multitenancy to meet Broadcom IT’s requirements for scale, performance, security and cost control.

Original Description

Presenter(s):

S. Kamran Naqvi, Chief Network Architect - EMEA, Broadcom

Tobin Hawkshaw, Network Architect, Broadcom

Broadcom is a corporation with about twenty-five thousand employees and twenty-three semiconductor and infrastructure software divisions. The company modernized its data-center and campus networking by replacing a legacy three-tier- vendor-locked stack with a disaggregated CLOS architecture running the open-network operating system SONiC and an open Ethernet ecosystem. The initiative began in early 2019 and progressed through a phased rollout from 2020 to 2026. Early work revealed interoperability and operational challenges across diverse hardware and software. Addressing these required organizational changes- new automation and telemetry- and closer hardware-software-operations collaboration. In this presentation- Broadcom architects describe how they validated SONiC and implemented a tenant-based architecture to isolate workloads and they share their lessons learned. The production environment now includes over ten thousand SONiC switches across multiple regions- supporting both data-center and campus use cases. Outcomes include reduced vendor lock-in- faster feature delivery- improved quality and a lower total cost of ownership.