Santa Clara, California, Aug. 18, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Pluribus Networks, the leader in open networking and controllerless software-defined networking (SDN) automation, announced the immediate availability of 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, which enables Pluribus customers to build bigger, faster fabrics with more services and even simpler operations. In response to increasing customer demand for high-performance, highly scalable data center fabrics, 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.
There are many other advanced features that have been delivered with Netvisor ONE R6.0 and the UNUM Management Platform R6.0. For more features and detail, visit the Pluribus blog on this topic.
Supporting Quotes
“We expect bare metal switches to reach 38 percent of ports shipped in 2024, up from 21 percent in 2019,” said Devan Adams, Principal Analyst Cloud & DC Research at Omdia. “Bare metal switches are the fastest growing segment within the data center switch market and Broadcom-based platforms dominate this portion of the market; as customers continue to adopt open networking solutions at a rapid rate demand increases for open software like Pluribus’ Netvisor ONE OS which is deployable on Broadcom-based 25Gbe and 100GbE switches.”
“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.”
“As Dell Technologies continues to lead an open approach to networking, it is critical that companies like Pluribus develop technologies that support this strategy,” said Drew Schulke, vice president of Networking at Dell Technologies. “By bringing its offerings to multiple new Dell switches, and with the 6.0 release, our customers have greater choice to deploy a flexible, open networking approach to their infrastructure.”
“We continue to see growing traction in the data center segment for Pluribus Networks’ open, controllerless SDN fabric solution running on Broadcom-based switches,” said George Tchaparian, CEO at Edgecore Networks. “We are pleased to partner with Pluribus Networks and to continue our cadence of enabling new Edgecore platforms into the market.”
“Our relationship with Broadcom and the precise execution of the Pluribus engineering team has enabled us to consistently deliver on the promise of open networking while creating tremendous value with SDN-automated fabrics for single-site and multi-site data center environments,” said Kumar Srikantan CEO at Pluribus Networks. “With support for the Trident 3 and Tomahawk 2 platforms complete, we continue to collaborate with Broadcom to deliver further innovations supporting high performance data centers supporting AI/ML, distributed cloud, and 5G services.”
Additional Info:
- Pluribus Blog Post: “Scale, Services, Simplicity: R6.0 Expands Broadcom-based Switch Portfolio and Showcases Multi-dimensional Innovation”
- Netvisor ONE OS
- Adaptive Cloud Fabric, controllerless SDN software
- Distributed Cloud Networking
About Pluribus Networks
Pluribus Networks delivers an open, controllerless software-defined network fabric for modern data centers, multi-site data centers and distributed cloud edge environments. The Linux-based Netvisor® ONE operating system and the Adaptive Cloud Fabric™have been purpose built to deliver radically simplified networking along with white box economics by leveraging open networking hardware from Celestica, Dell Technologies, Edgecore and Champion ONE as well as Pluribus’ own Freedom™Series of switches. The Adaptive Cloud Fabric controllerless SDN architecture distributes state and intelligence throughout the network fabric and is optimized to deliver rich and highly secure per-tenant services across data center sites with low cost, simple operations and no single point of failure. Pluribus Networks is also embedded in industry-leading Network Function Virtualization Infrastructure (NFVi) and distributed cloud solutions that are being deployed in the networks of the world’s largest 4G and 5G mobile network operators. Pluribus Networks is a founding member of the Linux Foundation’s LF Edge organization and a member of State of the Edge. Visit www.pluribusnetworks.com to learn more. Deployed to more than 300 customers worldwide, including more than 75 tier one mobile network operators, Pluribus unifies and automates physical and virtual networking and fits into distributed and compact environments found in emerging edge compute deployments.
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