Pluribus Networks expands distributed cloud portfolio

Pluribus Networks has introduced a significant expansion of its distributed cloud portfolio enabling telecom service providers to expand data center infrastructure to the central office, extend their cloud service offerings and accelerate network automation.

Friday, 24th January 2020 Posted 4 years ago in by Phil Alsop

With the latest release of its Netvisor® ONE operating system (OS) Pluribus Networks claims a number of industry firsts, including the first open networking software to support the Celestica Edgestone™ carrier-grade white box central office switch and the first integration of the data center gateway router function into the top-of-rack switch to reduce cost, power and space in constrained edge environments. The latest Netvisor ONE and Adaptive Cloud Fabric™ (ACF) release also includes improved deep network slicing, integration with Red Hat® OpenStack® Platform and expanded Red Hat Ansible® Automation Platform capabilities.

A Unique Approach to Automation for Compact Edge Data Centers

Pluribus’ mission is to simplify distributed cloud networking by providing a high-performance solution that fully automates and unifies Linux-based open networking, SDN, network virtualization and granular network analytics into a single cost-effective solution that is designed and tested to work out of the box. The architectural approach to the Pluribus Netvisor ONE OS and Adaptive Cloud Fabric (ACF) is unique in that it is “controllerless,” where all software modules are containerized, distributed and designed to leverage the processing power and memory resources built into the open networking data center switches themselves. Traditional solutions require many external servers; controller software licenses; CPU software licenses; and hardware-based probes, taps and packet brokers that typically need to be replicated site by site. The Pluribus Adaptive Cloud Fabric eliminates the need for most of the external hardware and software required by these traditional approaches, dramatically reducing complexity and cost and optimizing for constrained edge environments.

New Carrier-Class White Boxes Including Industry’s First Central Office Top-of-Rack Switch

Pluribus Netvisor ONE OS and Adaptive Cloud Fabric now support two new high-performance, carrier-class white box switch models from Celestica, enabling choice and flexibility for customers as they design their centralized, regional and distributed data center and cloud networks. Celestica Edgestone is the industry’s first NEBS-compliant top-of-rack white box switch boasting a high-performance Intel® multicore processor, all front-panel access and dual management ports in a 288-mm form factor designed for telco central offices and other environmentally challenging edge deployments. Celestica Seastone2E™ is a standard-depth 1RU switch based on the same chipsets and architecture and designed to bring carrier-class features to standard data center environments. Edgestone can be paired with NEBS-compliant compute and storage solutions to provide a complete distributed cloud solution for central office environments.

Integration of Data Center Gateway Router Function for Compact Environments

On June 6, 2019, Pluribus introduced the world’s first white box multi-tenant data center gateway router, based on containerized virtual routers (vRouters), offering a step-function improvement in price-performance for north-south data center traffic and cloud interconnect. With the latest release Pluribus has achieved another industry first by integrating this gateway vRouter functionality directly into Pluribus Netvisor ONE running on the top-of-rack switch. This capability is especially valuable in combination with the powerful Celestica platforms, which support the ability to scale to 128 vRouters, where each containerized vRouter supports a full Linux-based FRRouting instance per tenant for north-south traffic. This enables edge data centers equipped with the Adaptive Cloud Fabric to support deep slicing for both east-west traffic within the edge data center and north-south traffic entering and exiting the edge data center.

Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Integration for New Levels of Automation
The capabilities of Netvisor ONE and the Adaptive Cloud Fabric have been expanded to enable Red Hat OpenStack Platform orchestration of compute, storage and Pluribus-based networks for Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) environments. Telcos, mobile network operators and cloud service providers with Red Hat OpenStack Platform environments can take full advantage of the powerful end-to-end fabric overlay automation built into the Adaptive Cloud Fabric enabling fully automated virtualized networking that responds to dynamic compute and storage demands. Red Hat OpenStack services are fully containerized with Release 13, providing several integrations with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, providing a key step to support the deployment of containerized applications alongside those in virtual machines.

Additionally, Pluribus has further expanded the number of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform playbooks available to customers. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, combined with the Adaptive Cloud Fabric’s native automation, is a powerful tool for network teams to reduce operational costs, human error and network downtime while increasing agility and speed to service. Pluribus Networks is also working with Red Hat on enabling Red Hat OpenShift for Netvisor ONE and Adaptive Cloud Fabric.