Pluribus Networks, developer of technology enabling software-defined networking (SDN) via its programmable, open source-based operating system Netvisor announced the next evolution of its SDN strategy with the introduction of the Adaptive Cloud Fabric virtualised architecture.
Based on the Netvisor network virtualisation software, the new Adaptive Cloud Fabric is designed to offer a simple, dynamic and secure approach to building a distributed network architecture with the capabilities of cloud-scale, elasticity and adaptability for the modern data centre.
The Pluribus Adaptive Cloud Fabric provides an optimised and resilient operating environment designed to address the requirements of enterprise and service providers with the need to support transaction-intensive applications. The fabric distributes intelligence, integrates a range of advanced network services, provides visibility of all traffic traversing the network and is designed to facilitate the transition to a software-defined data centre.
The Adaptive Cloud Fabric operates without a controller and is claimed to deliver a more dynamic and elastic network with the ability adapt to changing requirements and a range of deployment scenarios to help streamline operations, improve efficiency and lower costs.
The Adaptive Cloud Fabric can be deployed across the data centre or in specific racks, pods, server farms or hyper-converged infrastructure such as Nutanix, vSAN and VxRail. In addition, multiple geographically distributed data centres can be interconnected into a fabric over any WAN or dark fibre infrastructure. The dynamic architecture provides multi-terabit capacity with predictable latency and can support millions of concurrent connections.
Pluribus' Adaptive Cloud Fabric is based on the Netvisor software running on open networking switch hardware, offering a virtualised network OS (NOS) and providing a Layer 2 and 3 networking foundation, distributed fabric intelligence and virtualised switch hardware, similar to how VMware virtualises a bare metal server.
In addition, Netvisor vPort technology serves to extend intelligence and control to all connected endpoints, VMs, containers and mobile devices across the fabric, tracking the location, identity, policy and history for each endpoint and dynamically sharing the status to all member devices in real-time.
The fabric also features APIs that enable integration with automation tools such as Ansible and programming languages such as Python, plus integration with VMware vCenter for centralised automation of virtual application infrastructure and orchestration of physical and virtual resources and workloads.
Netvisor OS integrates telemetry for visibility across the fabric, allowing monitoring for 10, 25, 40 and 100 Gbit/s interfaces without the need for dedicated network probes. The Netvisor software can run on Open Compute Project (OCP), and Open Network Install Environment (ONIE) hardware-compliant switches, including from Dell EMC, Edgecore and Pluribus Freedom series network switches.
