Paving the way to thousand node fabrics

As organizations seek to build distributed multi-site fabrics that can scale within centralized data centers, as well as outward to edge data centers, the Adaptive Cloud Fabric is designed to meet customer demands for 256, 512 or even 1,024 switches in a unified fabric. To enable even greater scalability, as well as standards-based interoperability and service extension to third-party fabrics, the Adaptive Cloud Fabric will also support open fabric extension with EVPN.

“In the current environment, data center network fabrics must scale in multiple dimensions to meet the challenges of large private cloud and edge computing deployments,” said Kumar Srikantan, CEO at Pluribus Networks. “The Adaptive Cloud Fabric is already proven as a distributed multi-site data center fabric that is highly cost-effective, automated, agile and easy to operate. Now we can extend all the advantages of the Adaptive Cloud Fabric’s controllerless SDN automation across much larger fabrics, while also enabling EVPN-based fabric extension and multi-vendor interoperability.”

A Proven Foundation: the Pluribus Adaptive Cloud Fabric

The Pluribus Adaptive Cloud Fabric, powered by the Netvisor® ONE OS, radically simplifies operations, reduces human error and lowers costs for data center networking. Built on open network switching, the unique controllerless SDN architecture incorporates network automation, virtualization, secure segmentation, visibility and analytics in a comprehensive, cost-effective and easy-to-use solution that works right out of the box. As an example, a traditional networking solution requires switch-by-switch configuration and 5,000+ commands to deploy a single Layer 3 service across a 256 switch data center fabric, while the Adaptive Cloud Fabric requires only three commands to invoke the same service. The Adaptive Cloud Fabric has been deployed by hundreds of customers to create secure software-defined data centers (SDDCs), unified network fabrics across multi-site data centers and distributed clouds for 5G and edge computing.

Adaptive Cloud Fabric Architectural Innovations: Scaling Networks to Deliver Tomorrow’s Distributed Private Clouds

The Adaptive Cloud Fabric meets network scalability demands with two complementary innovations:

● Thousand-Node Fabrics: Extending the advantages of controllerless SDN automation across larger fabrics. With a hierarchical multi-pod architecture and new capabilities incorporated into the Pluribus UNUM management system, Pluribus enables the Adaptive Cloud Fabric to scale far beyond current levels and meet virtually any customer’s scalability requirements. The new architecture is designed to scale to 256, 512 or even 1,024 switches in a unified fabric, extending the operational simplification benefits of the Adaptive Cloud Fabric to larger and more distributed data centers.

● Open Fabric Extension with EVPN: Enabling multi-fabric federation and multi-vendor interoperability. The Adaptive Cloud Fabric incorporates open fabric extension using BGP EVPN, which delivers additional scalability in two ways. First, this approach can enable even greater scalability in Pluribus-delivered network fabrics – far beyond 1,024 nodes, if needed – by seamlessly interconnecting and federating multiple Adaptive Cloud Fabrics and extending services between them. Open Fabric Extension with EVPN also supports standards-based interoperability and service extension to third-party fabrics, ideal for brownfield deployments and for those customers who desire multi-vendor environments.

The new levels of fabric scalability are enabling Pluribus customers to scale within larger centralized data centers and scale out to highly distributed edge data centers:

● A regional government agency has deployed a 64-node Adaptive Cloud Fabric in a single data center and will expand it to a unified 128-node fabric across two geographically separated data centers, enabling active-active operations for high application agility and availability with low operational complexity.

● Trilogy Networks is leading the Rural Cloud Initiative (RCI) along with numerous rural telecom network providers. Trilogy, which recently announced completion of Phase 1 of the RCI Farm of the Future and is transitioning to production network deployments, is using the Adaptive Cloud Fabric to connect hundreds of highly distributed edge computing sites into a unified fabric to support edge applications for precision agriculture.

“Our distributed multi-tenant cloud network traverses multiple islands of disparate mobile, wireline and long-haul fiber networks across rural America,” said Venky Swaminathan, founder and Chief Technical Officer at Trilogy Networks. “Pluribus’ Netvisor ONE OS and Adaptive Cloud Fabric enabled us to create a scalable, single network fabric experience for our customers. This will be a key component of Trilogy’s and the Rural Cloud Initiative’s efforts to build a unified, distributed cloud covering an area of 1.5 million square miles of rural America, providing the essential infrastructure for 5G, agriculture and energy solutions.”

“We expect bare metal switches- the fastest growing segment within the data center switch market, to reach 45 percent of ports shipped in 2024, up from 22 percent in 2019,” said Devan Adams, Principal Analyst Cloud & DC Research at Omdia. “As bare metal switch deployments continue to increase in both centralized and edge data centers, bare metal-based switching solutions that scale to support automated cloud to edge deployments will be in high demand.”