Pluribus Networks, a start-up based in Palo Alto, California, unveiled its “Freedom” architecture for integrating compute, network, storage and bare-metal hypervisor OS technologies.
Pluribus said its he 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.
The solution is based on a distributed network operating system with hypervisor bare-metal virtualization capabilities of computing resources – CPU, memory, and storage – and merchant silicon switch chip. This is matched to a powerful server platform combined with a high-density 10/40 GbE merchant silicon switch and network processor. The company said its technology partners include Intel and Broadcom.
In the Freedom architecture, the network switch becomes a true 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.
Key components of the Pluribus solution include:
1) Netvisor 2.0, the industry’s first and only bare-metal, distributed network hypervisor operating system with full integration of merchant silicon switch chips into the server hypervisor
2) 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 exactly like a server
3)Pluribus Network Freedom Care, 24x7x365 support with escalation engineers in the U.S., India and China.
4) 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
The company said the its architecture simplifies the infrastructure by eliminating:
- Separate monitoring network
- Separate SAN
- Separate overlay-underlay
- Separate external controllers
- L4-L7 appliance sprawl
- Separate servers for services and orchestration (PXE, DHCP, DNS, OpenStack controllers, Argus, Wireshark, and more)
Pluribus expects to enter general availability in a few weeks. Oracle and Cloud Flare are reference trial sites.
http://www.pluribusnetworks.com
