Sunday, February 9, 2014

Pluribus Networks Unveils its Virtualized Data Center Architecture

Pluribus Networks, a start-up based in Palo Alto, California, unveiled its "Freedom" architecture for integrating compute, network, storage and bare-metal hypervisor OS technologies.

Pluribus said its  he Freedom platform brings full bare-metal control and visibility into the network through powerful, Unix-style API to deliver true inNetwork Application Programmability, inNetwork virtualization, inNetwork analytics and inNetwork automation.

The solution is based on a distributed network operating system with hypervisor bare-metal virtualization capabilities of computing resources - CPU, memory, and storage - and merchant silicon switch chip. This is matched to a powerful server platform combined with a high-density 10/40 GbE merchant silicon switch and network processor.  The company said its technology partners include Intel and Broadcom.

In the Freedom architecture, the network switch becomes a true extension of the server. Merchant silicon chips are fully integrated into the operating system, controlled and virtualized like a NIC, and used as an offload/hardware acceleration engine for application flows and network functions. The network switch is managed by a server-class control plane through multi 10Gbps high-speed connections, unleashing a new class of services and functions to run directly “inside” the network; examples include the ability to run scalable monitoring and analytics for “physical” and “virtual” (tunneled) flows, free of taps and external monitoring gear.

Key components of the Pluribus solution include:

1) Netvisor 2.0, the industry’s first and only bare-metal, distributed network hypervisor operating system with full integration of merchant silicon switch chips into the server hypervisor

2) The Freedom Server-Switch product line, the industry’s most programmable network services platform based on off-the-shelf, open components to truly program, virtualize and automate the network exactly like a server

3)Pluribus Network Freedom Care, 24x7x365 support with escalation engineers in the U.S., India and China.

4) Freedom Development Kit (FDK), which allows developers to experience true inNetwork™ application programmability (with Unix-style tools such as C and Java) to support scalable and dynamic deployment of network-aware mission critical applications

The company said the its architecture simplifies the infrastructure by eliminating:

  • Separate monitoring network
  • Separate SAN
  • Separate overlay-underlay
  • Separate external controllers
  • L4-L7 appliance sprawl
  • Separate servers for services and orchestration (PXE, DHCP, DNS, OpenStack controllers, Argus, Wireshark, and more)

Pluribus expects to enter general availability in a few weeks. Oracle and Cloud Flare are reference trial sites.

http://www.pluribusnetworks.com

  • Pluribus is headed by Kumar Srikantan (CEO), who was previously VP/GM of HW Engineering for the Enterprise Networking Business at Cisco where he was responsible for the HW engineering execution of Cisco’s Enterprise Networking portfolio.
  • Investors in Pluribus include New Enterprise Associates, Menlo Ventures, Mohr Davidow and China Broadband Capital.