Tuesday, August 18, 2020

Pluribus broadens support for Broadcom-based switches

Pluribus Networks announced release 6.0 (R6.0) of its Linux Netvisor ONE® network operating system (OS) and release 6.0 of the Pluribus UNUM management and Insight Analytics platform for high-performance, highly scalable data center fabrics.

Pluribus Netvisor ONE 6.0 OS now supports multiple new spine and leaf/edge switches based on Broadcom’s Tomahawk 2 and Trident 3 switch series. Netvisor ONE R6.0 also features multiple fabric service innovations built on top of the open-source Linux FRRouting (FRR) suite version 7.2.

Highlights of the Netvisor ONE R6.0 include:

  • Support for New Broadcom-based Spine Switches: Netvisor ONE continues its leadership in open networking by supporting a trio of new white box switches based on the Broadcom Tomahawk 2 ASIC. The new platforms support 64 x 100G in 2RU including the Dell Z9264F-ON, the Edgecore AS7816-64X and the Freedom Series F9664-C. As these fixed form-factor scale-out spine switches continue to increase in port density, the need for expensive and complex chassis-based switches diminishes. R6.0 also adds support for the Dell S5232-ON, a compact 32 x 100G Trident 3-based spine switch.
  • Support for New Broadcom-based Leaf/Edge Switches: R6.0 also delivers new high performance switches based on the programmable and feature rich Broadcom Trident 3 switch series. This includes the Dell S5224-ON with 24 x 25GbE and 4 x 100 GbE along with the S5248-ON featuring 48 x 25GbE and 6 x 100GbE supporting large scale network virtualization, network segmentation/slicing and wirespeed per-flow visibility. These switches can be deployed at the top of rack in standard data centers and also are ideally suited to building fabrics across multiple edge data centers supporting distributed cloud, edge compute and 5G services.
  • Expanded Network Overlay Services – The key impact of the Adaptive Cloud Fabric, powered by the Netvisor ONE OS, is that services and policies can be implemented with one-touch fabric-wide provisioning across a single or multiple geo-distributed data center sites, simplifying operations and reducing the risk of security vulnerabilities due to mis-configuration. With R6.0 Pluribus has introduced a long list of new services that illustrates how the Adaptive Cloud Fabric provides a robust foundation for innovation and feature velocity for traditional and distributed cloud data centers. A few highlights from this list include:
  • Carrier Ethernet and layer 2 services: R6.0 introduces E-Tree service, with use cases in IoT Video Security and Metro Ethernet access/aggregation, complementing existing E-Line and E-LAN services.
  • Virtual Services Group (vSG): distributed multi-VRF and VRF leaking implementation designed to radically simplify service chaining. These new features enable increased multi-tenant scale and fine-grained microsegmentation, while also enabling service chaining through policy-based inter-VRF routing.
  • Integrated DC Gateway Router: R6.0 adds multi-VRF capability to the DC gateway router integrated into the leaf/edge switch, improving multi-tenant scale while minimizing space, power and cost in smaller edge data centers.
  • Network Packet Broker services: Pluribus has extended the industry’s only network packet broker solution implemented as a fully virtualized overlay service and capable of being deployed either as a stand-alone packet broker fabric or as an integrated service on a production switching network – an industry first.

Highlights of the UNUM Management Platform R6.0 include:

  • High Availability UNUM Cluster: UNUM can now be deployed with a pair of resilient servers as well as a pair of resilient seed switches in the fabric.
  • IP VirtualWire™ Dashboards: Powerful new graphical dashboards for VirtualWire lab automation use cases, improving visibility of connected devices under test and simplifying creation of connections across a single or multiple geo-distributed labs.
  • UNUM Archiver for Insight Analytics: Enables the storage of 10s of billions of per-flow metadata and switch analytics in a separate NFS repository for historical analysis and compliance purposes.


“Our collaboration with Pluribus has been unwavering for more than 10 years,” said Ram Velaga, senior vice president and general manager, Core Switching Group, Broadcom. “It is fantastic to see Pluribus leveraging our high performance Tomahawk 2 and Trident 3 across multiple white box switches. We are pleased to continue the collaboration on our Trident 4 ASIC featuring NPL programmability and a high density of 100GbE and 400GbE interfaces.”