Pluribus Unveils New Release to Enhance Deployments in Enterprise Networks 

Pluribus Networks, the company that brings together compute, network, storage and virtualization into a programmable and hyper-converged SDN platform, announced today a new release of its Netvisor operating system that enhances deployments in mainstream enterprise networks. With this Pluribus Netvisor release, enterprises do not need to make a tradeoff between SDN future-proofing and compatibility with their ‘brownfield’ Layer 2 and IP networks.

Key features of the release include:

• REST APIs in addition to existing CLI and vManage GUI support, permitting deployment with current NetOps skillsets
• VXLAN tunneling for virtual machine connectivity across arbitrary backbones
• Layer 2 resiliency via standard protocols such as MLAG Active-Active Virtual Link Aggregation Groups
• BGP fabrics and Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol for data-center scale-out and Hadoop

The Pluribus open Freedom architecture enables true programmability via C++, Java, Python and APIs, which is an advantage compared to competitive solutions that only have scripting. In addition, a standard CLI, REST APIs and the vManage GUI permit deployment by the network operations team using their existing router and switch skillsets.

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. This programmable ‘application fabric’ brings compute closer to the switch infrastructure.

“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,” said Nick Lippis, chair of the Open Networking User Group (ONUG). “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.”