Multi-site data centre modernisation

High-performance open networking hardware from Dell EMC with Pluribus controllerless SDN enables business acceleration through multi-site data center automation.

  • Wednesday, 8th January 2020 Posted 4 years ago in by Phil Alsop

 Anana Ltd, the leading provider of omnichannel customer experience solutions, has deployed Pluribus’ Netvisor® ONE operating system and Adaptive Cloud Fabric™, along with Dell EMC Open Networking hardware, as part of a multi-site network modernization project.

Anana’s mission is ensuring that businesses can engage with customers more efficiently than ever before. Anana’s network team realized that delivering on this promise to its diverse customers required a high-performance, highly automated infrastructure to unify its two data centers and enable more agile service delivery. They needed to be able to see traffic flows from across the entire network in order to be faster in identifying and responding to troubleshooting issues. Finally, they required deep network slicing across the control, management and data planes to segment application and customer traffic.

“With Pluribus’ controllerless SDN and Adaptive Cloud Fabric, we can dynamically move virtual machines, applications and workloads between data centers, and do maintenance without impacting customers. We can update policy across the entire network with a single command. We’re improving our service levels and customer satisfaction at the same time. Our network is highly automated, enabling us to better serve our business, and our business to better serve our customers,” said Gareth Evans, Anana Infrastructure Manager.

Adaptive Cloud Fabric for Multi-Site Data Centers 

Anana selected the Pluribus Linux-based Netvisor ONE network operating system, featuring the Adaptive Cloud Fabric running on Dell EMC Open Networking Switches, for its ability to create an SDN-controlled network fabric that federates together a large number of geographically distributed switches to appear as one logical switch, radically simplifying network operations. 

Pluribus’ controllerless architecture leverages the processing power inside the switches that are already deployed, distributing intelligence to every switch in the network. This distributed approach to automation lowers costs by eliminating the expense of multiple controllers while improving performance. Now, from any switch, the Anana team can see the entire fabric, troubleshoot the entire fabric or update policy across the fabric. This new level of automation allows Anana to better serve customers while making their own operations even more efficient and cost-effective.

Anana also benefits from Pluribus Insight Analytics, which leverages embedded Netvisor monitoring telemetry and packet flow data sources to enable pervasive visibility across the network, eliminating the need for expensive probes or complex monitoring overlay networks. With end-to-end visibility into all connections that traverse the entire data center fabric, Anana can analyze and compare actual versus desired performance and implement corrective actions, such as changes to policy or rerouting traffic to implement on-demand changes to the infrastructure. 

“It’s a brilliant starting point for an investigation,” said Evans. “We can isolate issues and resolve them much more quickly now, which really helps us keep our internal users and our customers happy.”