Pluribus Networks Simplifies the Software-Defined Data Center

SAN FRANCISCO, April 25, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Open Networking User Group Conference – Pluribus Networks today announced a major evolution to its Software-Defined Networking (SDN) strategy with the introduction of the Adaptive Cloud Fabric™ virtualized architecture. Built on the deployment-proven Netvisor® network virtualization software, the Adaptive Cloud Fabric is a simple, dynamic and secure approach to building a holistic distributed network architecture that brings the benefits of cloud-scale, elasticity and adaptability to the modern data center. The Adaptive Cloud Fabric delivers a highly optimized and resilient operating environment to meet the mission-critical requirements of enterprise and service provider organizations to support transaction-intensive applications. The fabric distributes intelligence, integrates a broad range of advanced network services, and provides pervasive visibility for all traffic traversing the network. 

To empower the journey to the digital enterprise, today's data center networks need to move from being static and hardware-bound, to a more dynamic, software-driven environment. The network matters, and first-generation SDN technology addressed many limitations of the traditional network architecture. However, widespread SDN deployments have been inhibited by the complexity associated with controllers and proprietary protocols that require significant changes to the network architecture and operation. SDN controllers introduced undesired complexity and limit interoperability, typically requiring replacement of the entire data center network to implement a software-defined deployment.

"As the industry transitions to a cloud-based software defined world, the Pluribus Networks Adaptive Cloud Fabric has many of the attributes needed as Infrastructure DevOps professionals build fabrics custom tailored to their corporation's digital transformation strategy requirements. Their fabric architecture and the ability to virtualize the switch is a unique capability, that allows users to achieve new capabilities from their network such as integrating new services, and building granular segmentation across a network fabric. In particular its Automation and Programmability plus integrated End-to-End visibility features will be warmly received," said Nick Lippis, Co-Founder and Co-Chair, Open Networking User Group. 

The Adaptive Cloud Fabric empowers organizations to speed their transition to a Software-Defined Data Center with a simpler and non-disruptive architecture that makes it easier to deliver, manage and secure service delivery across clouds and devices. The Adaptive Cloud Fabric operates without a controller and delivers a more dynamic and elastic network that adapts to change and a wide-range of deployment scenarios to streamline operations, improve efficiency and lower costs.

The Adaptive Cloud Fabric can be deployed across the data center, or targeted to specific racks, pods, server farms or Hyper-Converged Infrastructure, such as Nutanix™, vSAN and VxRail™. Multiple geographically distributed data centers can be interconnected into a seamless fabric over any WAN or dark fiber to optimize performance and resource availability, improve resiliency and support disaster recovery requirements without special protocols or reengineering. The dynamic, scale-out architecture delivers multi-terabit capacity with predictable performance and latency and supports millions of concurrent connections, enabling organizations of any size to build a next-generation private or public cloud that is optimized to support mission-critical environments such as virtualized applications, hybrid IT, Internet of Things (IoT) and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI).

"The true value of the Software-Defined Data Center lies in the evolution of infrastructure to a Cloud-like 'as a Service' delivery model. While automation and programmability are important components, service integration and network virtualization are the key to effective next-generation transformations, and are dramatically increasing value of the network," said Kumar Srikantan, president and chief executive officer of Pluribus Networks. "The Adaptive Cloud Fabric radically simplifies the network and enables organizations to meet a diverse range of deployment requirements for distributed network environments. Our focus is to empower enterprise and service provider organizations to speed their migration to a impler, more resilient and modern architecture, while reducing complexity, improving operational efficiency and increasing the utilization of valuable IT resources."

Powered by Netvisor OS 
The Adaptive Cloud Fabric is built on the innovative and deployment-proven Netvisor software running on open networking switch hardware. Netvisor is a virtualized Network Operating System (NOS) that provides a best-in-class layer 2 and layer 3 networking foundation, distributed fabric intelligence and virtualizes the switch hardware, similar to how VMware® virtualizes a bare metal server. Switch virtualization decouples network resources from the underlying hardware to create multiple network containers on a single device that can be dynamically allocated. A single switch can instantiate multiple network containers, each with their own virtualized router, to support granular east/west and north/south network segmentation, strict multi-tenant services and the integration of virtualized network services and functions.

Distributed Fabric Architecture
The Adaptive Cloud Fabric is a peer-to-peer distributed fabric that clusters all switches into a unified operating domain, enabling them to operate and be managed as a single virtualized switch. All switch-to-switch communications, configuration, policies and state information is dynamically updated across the fabric. The deployment of an Adaptive Cloud Fabric can be implemented in a single data center, or distributed geographically to support Data Center Interconnect (DCI) requirements over any existing WAN or dark fiber connections to support stringent loss-less high availability or disaster recovery scenarios.

Dynamic Intelligence
Netvisor vPort technology extends intelligence and control to all connected endpoints, VMs, containers and mobile devices across the global fabric. vPort tracks the location, identity, policy and history for each endpoint, and dynamically shares state status to all member devices in real-time, eliminating network broadcasts. To meet the requirements of transaction-centric applications such as IoT, vPort intelligence enables deeper endpoint context and control for physical and virtual applications, and can scale to support millions of endpoints. Netvisor vPort technology is automatically extended to fabric-attached VMware server clusters, located within the private cloud or a public cloud server farm, such as Amazon® Web Services or Microsoft® Azure®.

Automation and Programmability
The Adaptive Cloud Fabric provides centralized management with a single point of control across the entire network to define and implement fabric-wide provisioning and policies quickly and efficiently. Any fabric member can act as a logical configuration point, eliminating box-by-box management and dramatically improving agility, control and service velocity. Flexible APIs support integration with popular automation tools such as Ansible, and programming languages such as Python, enable the provisioning of fabric-wide policies and services in minutes. Integration with VMware vCenter extends automation to the virtual application infrastructure, allowing seamless orchestration of physical and virtual resources and workloads from a single management pane, simplifying IT operations, increasing efficiency and reducing the risk of errors.

Integrated End-to-End Visibility
The Netvisor OS contains embedded telemetry enabling pervasive visibility across the entire fabric. This allows monitoring at the speed of the network with coverage for all 10, 25, 40 and 100 Gigabit interfaces without dedicated network probes. These integrated real-time sensors monitor every individual TCP connection, measuring east/west and north/south traffic flows, and virtualized workloads to expose network and application performance characteristics. The Netvisor telemetry generates rich metadata that is accessible through an open API, as well as being consumed by the Pluribus Insight Analytics™ platform. The integrated visibility provides real-time actionable insight to quickly pinpoint performance issues, accelerate troubleshooting, improve operational intelligence, identify security risks and speed remediation activities.

Leveraging Network Intelligence
The integrated telemetry and intelligence of the Adaptive Cloud Fabric tracks network and end-point service state to understand how the users and services are consuming the infrastructure, and conversely how the infrastructure is supporting the users and services. Future enhancements will advance the depth of state-based intelligence across the fabric to dynamically compare actual versus desired state and automate corrective actions such as security or traffic policy changes, reroute traffic, and link to other systems to implement dynamic changes to the infrastructure, redefining real-time service assurance.

Runs on Open Networking Hardware
The Pluribus Netvisor software runs on Open Compute Project (OCP), and Open Network Install Environment (ONIE) hardware compliant switches, including devices from Dell EMC, Edgecore and the Pluribus Freedom™ series network switches. This flexibility allows organizations the choice of hardware to scale-out networks with any combination of 10, 25, 40 or 100 Gigabit interfaces, enabling an entire data center to be built with only 2-3 physical switch models – driven only by the type and speed of interfaces required – improving operational consistency, lowering costs, and simplifying sparing.

"Steelcase's data center network spans 3 locations in the US and Europe," said Roger Dore, manager IT Infrastructure at Steelcase. "We needed to simplify and modernize, and The Fabric allowed us to connect our data centers into a single managed entity. Our seven new virtualized data centers with tenant services better support our lines of business, and integrated monitoring helps us identify when and where network and application performance issues exist so we can take action quickly."

Availability
The Netvisor version 2.5.3 software, Adaptive Cloud Fabric and Insight Analytics are available now. The Netvisor software is licensed as perpetual or subscription on a per-switch basis. Pluribus Networks offers a broad range of support and professional service options including global 24x7 support. Please contact Pluribus Networks or a Pluribus Networks authorized reseller for more information.

About Pluribus Networks
Pluribus Networks is simplifying the Software-Defined Data Center with its simple, dynamic and secure Adaptive Cloud Fabric architecture, enabling organizations to build scalable private and public clouds that improve service velocity, performance, and reliability. The company's innovative Netvisor software virtualizes open networking hardware to build a holistic, distributed network that is more intelligent, automated and resilient. The company's Insight Analytics platform leverages embedded telemetry and other data sources to enable pervasive visibility across the network to reveal network and application performance that speeds troubleshooting and improves operational and security intelligence. Pluribus Networks has received venture funding from Temasek Holdings, NEA, Menlo Ventures, and AME Cloud Ventures. Pluribus Networks is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, with development and support centers in Bangalore, India; Phoenix, AZ; Dallas, TX; and Hong Kong, PRC. For additional information contact Pluribus Networks at [email protected], or visit www.pluribusnetworks.com. Follow us on Twitter @pluribusnet.

For further information, contact:

Eli May
Method Communications
+1 415-849-1306
[email protected]

Netvisor is a registered trademark, and Pluribus Networks, the Pluribus logo, Adaptive Cloud Fabric, Insight Analytics, Freedom and "The Network Matters" are trademarks of Pluribus Networks, Inc., VMware is a registered trademark of VMware, Inc., Nutanix is a trademark of Nutanix, Inc., and VxRail is a trademark of Dell EMC. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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