Pluribus Networks, the company that brings together compute, network and storage into a single platform, announced today the general availability of its network hypervisor software, Netvisor 2.0, and the Pluribus Freedom Server-Switch product line.
The Pluribus Freedom architecture presents a combination of compute, network, storage and bare-metal hypervisor OS technologies, and has been designed to bring network and services much closer to the applications. The Freedom architecture enables:
- A new class of network-aware, mission-critical enterprise applications and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) services, leveraging compute, network and storage integration
- An open architecture to drive radical consolidation and simplification of the datacenter infrastructure
- Complete unification of the DevOps/NetOps management model to drive ultimate network simplification and ease of management
- Pluribus customers and partners are already taking advantage of the Freedom Platform that enables a new breed of applications in their environments. Pluribus Networks is a Gold level member of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN).
“The Pluribus Networks Freedom architecture is a disruptive combination of software and hardware technologies. By running Oracle Solaris on it, Oracle Solaris can control Compute, Network and Storage technologies, which can help eliminate bottlenecks that would impact the application performance,” said Markus Flierl, vice president, Oracle Solaris. “With the integration between Oracle Solaris and the highly programmable Netvisor architecture, Oracle Solaris can control networking resources, which allows for ideal service availability in a cloud environment, including end-to-end analytics, end-to-end SLA enforcement, dynamic network provisioning and exceptional application high availability.”
“When designing a high-throughput, extreme low-latency messaging solution, the compute and network infrastructure needs to be highly optimized,” said Denny Page, senior vice president of Messaging at TIBCO Software. “With the Pluribus platform, we found a disruptive combination of low-latency/high-performance networking blended with high-end compute capabilities to deliver a ground-breaking messaging platform with no equal in the industry.”
“The network represents a mission-critical part of our infrastructure here at CloudFlare, and we decided to standardize our worldwide network infrastructure on the Pluribus Networks Freedom Server-Switch and Netvisor technologies,” said Joshua Motta, head of special projects at CloudFlare. “We are impressed with Pluribus’ architecture and its unique combination of control and data plane network performance blended with the ability to program the network exactly like a server. Our developers have a platform with unprecedented flexibility to design custom Internet security and web acceleration applications into the network, with increased performance and reduced cost.”
The Pluribus Networks offering includes the following:
- Netvisor 2.0, the industry’s first and only bare-metal, distributed network hypervisor operating systems with full integration of merchant silicon switch chips into the server hypervisor
- The Freedom Server-Switch product line, the industry’s most programmable network services platform based on off-the-shelf, open components to truly program, virtualize and automate the network just like a server
- Pluribus Network Freedom Care, seamless global support. Based on a global organization with global support center in the U.S., India and China, Freedom Care offers customers 24x7x365 worldwide support. The support team is only comprised of escalation engineers; there is no scripted “helpdesk” to slow the progress.
- Freedom Development Kit (FDK), which allows developers to experience true inNetwork™ application programmability (with Unix-style tools such as C and Java) to support scalable and dynamic deployment of network-aware mission critical applications.
- Pluribus Freedom Architecture Overview and Benefits
The Pluribus Freedom architecture presents a combination of switch, compute, storage and bare-metal hypervisor OS technologies, and has been designed to accelerate the integration of services and applications into the network.
At the heart of the Freedom platform is the Netvisor OS, the industry’s first and only distributed network operating systems with hypervisor bare-metal virtualization capabilities of computing resources – CPU, memory, and storage – and merchant silicon switch chips. Unleashing the full power of the Netvisor OS is the novel Freedom Server-Switch architecture, which includes a powerful server platform combined with a high-density 10/40 GbE merchant silicon switch and network processor.
In the Freedom architecture, the network switch becomes an extension of the server. Merchant silicon chips are fully integrated into the operating system, controlled and virtualized like a NIC, and used as an offload/hardware acceleration engine for application flows and network functions. The network switch is managed by a server-class control plane through multi 10Gbps high-speed connections, unleashing a new class of services and functions to run directly “inside” the network; examples include the ability to run scalable monitoring and analytics for “physical” and “virtual” (tunneled) flows, free of taps and external monitoring gear.
The Freedom platform brings full bare-metal control and visibility into the network through powerful, Unix-style API to deliver true inNetwork™ Application Programmability, inNetwork™ virtualization, inNetwork™ analytics and inNetwork™ automation. This can simplify the infrastructure by eliminating:
- Separate monitoring networks
- Separate SANs
- Separate overlays-underlays
- Separate external controllers
- L4-L7 appliance sprawl
- Separate servers for services and orchestration (PXE, DHCP, DNS, OpenStack controllers, Argus, Wireshark, and more)
- Technology Highlights of the Freedom Architecture
Bare-metal compute and network programmability for L4-L7 applications and services to advance true bare metal SDN/NFV/and transport-aware applications; customers in fields such as financial HFT, CDN, big data, cloud and real-time messaging infrastructure are building a new breed of transport-aware applications.
The ability to operate a physical and virtual infrastructure without the need to run separate additional underlay-overlay networks, which can meaningfully simplify operations and reduce the time to deploy new applications with “wire-once and re-wire virtually” technology.
“At Morado Ventures, we operate a cloud infrastructure to offer our companies a platform to deploy and manage their own services. Our tenants leverage the compute, network and storage infrastructure, entirely orchestrated by the Pluribus Networks Freedom platform, to run a combination of virtualized and bare-metal workloads including large-scale Hadoop instances,” said Ash Patel, managing director at Morado Ventures. “With Pluribus, we found a powerful yet simple solution to virtualize the network and offer orchestration services in a multi-tenant environment. The ability to wire-the-rack once and flexibly re-provision servers on the fly in literally seconds dramatically simplifies our operations.”
By leveraging the high availability, server-style clustering technology, Netvisor offers a fully automated and distributed fabric-cluster with the following advantages:
- Applications and services deployed on top of the cluster can have fabric-wide visibility.
- Any node in the cluster can have the same view of the network and offer a single (yet distributed) point of management to help eliminate any single point of failure.
- The distributed, peer-to-peer, master-free nature of the cluster makes it highly available, helping to remove any single point of failure and leveraging a well-known three-phase commit algorithm developed for computer and database clusters.
- Fabric-wide analytics: customers can monitor up to hundreds of millions of flows in real time (with the option of up to 6.4 TB of Fusion-io storage), or keep historical logging with VM granularity for traffic including VXLAN tunnels. The network does not need additional separate specialized network gear or network taps to be monitored.
- Fabric-wide flow programmability with bare-metal performance and scale: monitor, intercept, re-route, or drop flow across the fabric without the need to understand the physical topology or the exact route of the flow through the network.
- Elastic provisioning of virtual services with bare metal performance: the Freedom Server-Switch platform is an ideal point at the datacenter edge to consolidate and virtualize orchestration services (e.g. OpenStack), as well as network services such as DHCP, PXE, DNS, SLB, Argus auditing software, Wireshark, and others. Pluribus is actively engaged with L4-L7 services partners to bring more services on the Freedom Server-Switch platform in future releases.
The Netvisor 2.0 OS is available now in three configurations:
- Enterprise L2/L3 Switching (IPS-NVOS2.0)
- Advanced Cluster-Automation (SDF-NVOS2.0)
- Advanced Virtualization Services (ASDF-NVOS2.0)
The Freedom Server-Switch Series includes the following three SKUs:
- Freedom F64-L: Server-Switch (2U) with dual Xeon E5-class CPU, 64GB RAM, 240G SSD, Network Processor (NPU), 48x10G/1G ports + 4x40G ports and 40G of total CPU-switch bandwidth
- Freedom F64-M: Server-Switch (2U) with single Xeon E5-class CPU, 32GB RAM, 240G SSD, 48x10G/1G ports + 4x40G ports and 40G of total CPU-switch bandwidth
- Freedom E68-M: Server-Switch (1U) Switch with Single Xeon-E3-class CPU, 16GB RAM, 240G SSD, 44x10G SFP+ 6x40G QSFP, and 4G of total CPU-switch bandwidth
For a limited time, the following software, hardware and support bundles are available:
- “Virtualization Without Limits” bundle: F64-M with F-ASDF-NVOS2.0 and three months of full support included (F64-M-ASDF)
- “Cluster Automation” bundle: E68-M with E-SDF-NVOS2.0 and three months of full support included (E68-MSDF)
