Freedom Architecture Available From Pluribus

Pluribus Networks Inc. announced the availability of its network hypervisor software, Netvisor 2.0, and the Pluribus Freedom Server-Switch product line.

The architecture presents a combination of compute, network, storage and bare-metal hypervisor OS technologies, and has been designed to bring network and services closer to the applications.

The architecture enables:

A class of network-aware enterprise applications and network functions virtualization services, leveraging compute, network and storage integration

An open architecture to drive consolidation and simplification of the datacenter infrastructure

Unification of the DevOps/NetOps management model to drive network simplification and ease of management

Pluribus customers and partners are taking advantage of the platform that enables a breed of applications in their environments. The company is a gold level member of Oracle PartnerNetwork.

“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, VP, 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 HA.“

“When designing a high-throughput, extreme low-latency messaging solution, the compute and network infrastructure needs to be highly optimized,” said Denny Page, SVP of Messaging, TIBCO Software Inc. “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, CloudFlare Inc. “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 offering includes:

Netvisor 2.0, bare-metal, distributed network hypervisor OSs with integration of merchant silicon switch chips into the server hypervisor

The Freedom Server-Switch product line, a network services platform based on off-the-shelf, open components to program, virtualize and automate the network just like a server

Pluribus Network Freedom Care, global support. Based on an organization with support center in the U.S., India and China, it offers customers 24x7x365 worldwide support. The support team is comprised of escalation engineers; there is no scripted helpdesk to slow the progress.

Freedom Development Kit (FDK), which allows developers to experience in network application programmability (with Unix-style tools such as C and Java) to support scalable deployment of network-aware applications.

Overview and Benefits
The 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 platform is the Netvisor OS, a distributed network OSs with hypervisor bare-metal virtualization capabilities of computing resources – CPU, memory, and storage – and merchant silicon switch chips. Unleashing the power of the OS is the Freedom Server-Switch architecture, which includes a server platform combined with a high-density 10/40GbE merchant silicon switch and network processor.

In the architecture, the network switch becomes an extension of the server. Merchant silicon chips are integrated into the OS, 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 control plane through multi 10Gb/s high-speed connections, unleashing a class of services and functions to run ‘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 platform brings bare-metal control and visibility into the network through 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)

Highlights of the Architecture

Bare-metal compute and network programmability for L4-L7 applications and services to advance 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 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 simplify operations and reduce the time to deploy 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, MD, 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 literallys dramatically simplifies our operations.“

By leveraging the HA, server-style clustering technology, Netvisor offers an 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 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 6.4TB 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 platform is a 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 engaged with L4-L7 services partners to bring more services on the platform in future releases.

Product Availability and Configurations

The Netvisor 2.0 OS is available in three configurations:

Enterprise L2/L3 Switching (IPS-NVOS2.0)

Advanced Cluster-Automation (SDF-NVOS2.0)

Advanced Virtualization Services (ASDF-NVOS2.0)

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: