WebMail 
Pluribus bolsters software-defined data center software, Broadcom support
Pluribus Networks has rolled out new software and analytics packages that take aim at customers looking to build and manage software-defined data-center fabrics.
The packages include a new release of the company’s core network operating system, Netvisor One, and the accompanying Unum management software as well as a new version of its Insight Analytics platform. They’re all designed to simplify the operations of large-scale traditional and distributed edge data centers, the company said.
Netvisor ONE is a virtualized NOS that provides Layer 2 and Layer 3 networking, distributed fabric intelligence. It virtualizes switch hardware and implements what the company calls an Adaptive Cloud Fabric. Adaptive Cloud Fabric operates without a controller and can be deployed across a single data center, or targeted to specific racks, pods, server farms or hyper-converged infrastructures, the company said.
In addition, multiple geographically distributed data centers can be interconnected into a fabric over any WAN or dark-fiber network to optimize performance and resource availability without special protocols or reengineering, the company said. Ultimately a single Netvisor ONE instance can control multiple Pluribus-based networks and distribute policies across those environments, the company stated.
With the new release, Netvisor ONE OS version 6, the company has added an integrated data-center gateway router that lets customers tie together large sites from private cloud hosts and colocation providers to hyperscale public cloud providers and internet service providers.
The company said it had extended its integrated network packet-broker support as a fully virtualized overlay service that can be deployed either as a stand-alone packet broker fabric or as an integrated service on a production switching network. The idea is that traffic coming from the production network can be intelligently filtered at wire speed by the fabric and delivered to multiple security, performance, and compliance tools to offer real-time monitoring of application performance, the company said.
Another key component of this announcement was an extension of the Pluribus partnership with Broadcom. The company said Netvisor ONE has been optimized to support three new white-box switches based on the Broadcom Tomahawk 2 ASIC.
The new platforms, supporting 64 100G Ethernet ports in two rack units, are the Dell Z9264F-ON, the Edgecore AS7816-64X and the Pluribus 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, Pluribus stated. The new release also adds support for the Dell S5232-ON, a one rack unit 32 x 100G Ethernet Trident 3-based spine switch, the company stated.
Version 6.0 also supports new high-performance switches based on the programmable Broadcom Trident 3 family of ASICs. This includes the Dell S5224-ON with 24 x 25G Ethernet and 4 x 100G Ethernet along with the S5248-ON featuring 48 x 25G Ethernet and 6 x 100G Ethernet supporting edge services, large scale network virtualization, network segmentation/slicing and wire-speed visibility. These switches can be deployed at top of rack and are aimed at customers building data-center fabrics in multiple edge data centers supporting distributed cloud, edge compute and 5G services, Pluribus stated.
On the management front, Pluribus extended its Insight Analytics platform so it supports tens of billions of “per-flow metadata records beyond the 30-day limit in a separate NFS repository. Administrators can copy the archived files to other long-term storage for historical analysis and compliance purposes,” the company stated. Insight Analytics is the company’s platform for monitoring and collecting in-application performance and network troubleshooting information.
Unum 6.0 can also be configured to support two instances, rather than its current single instance, so customers can manage larger scale environments and increase availability.
A new graphical interface in Unum 6.0 makes it easier to see devices under Unum management as well, they company said.