Pluribus Networks Announces Freedom Architecture 

Pluribus Networks 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

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
• 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.

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)