Wednesday, October 7, 2020

Pluribus scales up with its Adaptive Cloud Fabric

Pluribus Networks introduced a number of architectural enhancements to its Adaptic Cloud Fabric to scale hybrid clouds and edge data centers to thousands of nodes.

The Pluribus Adaptive Cloud Fabric, powered by the Netvisor ONE OS and open network switching hardware, leverages a controllerless SDN architecture that incorporates network automation, virtualization, secure segmentation, visibility and analytics.

The company is introducing two complementary innovations:

  • Thousand-Node Fabrics: Extending the advantages of controllerless SDN automation across larger fabrics. With a hierarchical multi-pod architecture and new capabilities incorporated into the Pluribus UNUM management system, Pluribus enables the Adaptive Cloud Fabric to scale far beyond current levels and meet virtually any customer’s scalability requirements. The new architecture is designed to scale to 256, 512 or even 1,024 switches in a unified fabric, extending the operational simplification benefits of the Adaptive Cloud Fabric to larger and more distributed data centers.
  • Open Fabric Extension with EVPN: Enabling multi-fabric federation and multi-vendor interoperability. The Adaptive Cloud Fabric incorporates open fabric extension using BGP EVPN, which delivers additional scalability in two ways. First, this approach can enable even greater scalability in Pluribus-delivered network fabrics – far beyond 1,024 nodes if needed – by seamlessly interconnecting and federating multiple Adaptive Cloud Fabrics and extending services between them. Open fabric extension with EVPN also supports standards-based interoperability and service extension to 3rd party fabrics, ideal for brownfield deployments and for those customers who desire multi-vendor environments.

“In the current environment, data center network fabrics must scale in multiple dimensions to meet the challenges of large private cloud and edge computing deployments,” said Kumar Srikantan, CEO at Pluribus Networks. “The Adaptive Cloud Fabric is already proven as a distributed multi-site data center fabric that is highly cost-effective, automated, agile and easy to operate. Now we can extend all the advantages of the Adaptive Cloud Fabric’s controllerless SDN automation across much larger fabrics, while also enabling EVPN-based fabric extension and multi-vendor interoperability.”

Pluribus notes that its Adaptive Cloud Fabric has been deployed by hundreds of customers to create secure software-defined data centers (SDDCs), unified network fabrics across multi-site data centers, and distributed clouds for 5G and edge computing. The company cites two recent examples:

  • A regional government agency has deployed a 64-node Adaptive Cloud Fabric in a single data center and will expand it to a unified 128-node fabric across two geographically separated data centers, enabling active-active operations for high application agility and availability with low operational complexity.
  • Trilogy Networks is leading the Rural Cloud Initiative (RCI) along with numerous rural telecom network providers. Trilogy, which recently announced completion of Phase 1 of the RCI Farm of the Future and is transitioning to production network deployments, is using the Adaptive Cloud Fabric to connect hundreds of highly distributed edge computing sites into a unified fabric to support edge applications for precision agriculture.

https://www.pluribusnetworks.com/