According to Pluribus, compatibility with existing networking hardware and skillsets allows incremental SDN-ready switch deployment at the leaf or spine as opposed to a complete fabric rip-and-replace. For example, an enterprise considering a visibility fabric upgrade could replace its top-of-rack/leaf switches with Pluribus SDN technology for equal or less cost than the visibility upgrade, while preserving the existing core/spine investment.
Pluribus Networks,a software-defined networking (SDN) startup, updates it Netvisor, a distributed network hypervisor operating system that converges compute, network, storage and virtualization with an open, programmable approach to enhance deployments in mainstream enterprise networks. With this Pluribus Netvisor release, Pluribus said that enterprises do not need to make a tradeoff between SDN future-proofing and compatibility with their ‘brownfield’ Layer 2 and IP networks. In addition, the programmable ‘application fabric’ makes compute closer to the switch infrastructure.
With the latest update, Pluribus introduces REST APIs in addition to existing CLI and vManage GUI support, permitting deployment with current NetOps skillsets. The company also includes data communications features on the network hypervisor, including adding VXLAN tunneling for virtual machine connectivity across arbitrary backbones, Layer 2 resiliency via standard protocols such as MLAG Active-Active Virtual Link Aggregation Groups and BGP fabrics and Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol for data-center scale-out and Hadoop.
Nick Lippis, Chair of the Open Networking User Group (ONUG)
What is fundamentally different and desirable from an SDN perspective is the S and D that is software-defined. Pluribus’ open Freedom architecture is one of the only programmable networking environments that offers multiple degrees of freedom when IT executives deploy overlays and network service virtualization projects. This new version of the Pluribus Netvisor operating system represents a fundamental shift to open software on commodity hardware, a strategy that the ONUG community has been advocating since inception.
