SDN – Why all the fuss? Executive Summary: Few advances in networking technology over the past decade have received
as much attention and generated as much noise as SDN. Few advances have left as many confused
and scratching their heads either. In the end, we feel that much of the fuss and excitement is about
bringing apps to the network.
Rise of the Smartphone
One way to understand SDN is to liken the coming of SDN
to the rise of the smartphone. Back in the day you might
have had a number of gadgets – perhaps a watch, a
calculator, a Walkman, and maybe a GPS. Of course, we
now see far fewer of these dedicated pieces of hardware as
their functions are all performed by apps running on a
smartphone.
And in effect, the iPhone or Android device you carry in your
pocket is a hyper-converged platform, integrating compute,
storage, networking, the cloud, the various applications
you’ve loaded, and a powerful operating system tying it all
together.
It’s All About the Apps
On a fundamental level SDN is a decoupling of the control
Most of the items in this ad have
been replaced by smartphone
apps
plane from the data plane. In practical terms what this means is that it will be easier to do new
things with the network in software. It means that new functionality can be added relatively easily
and quickly without having to add hardware. It also means that the software doing useful,
interesting things on the network doesn’t have to come from the same vendor who built the
network itself. At this point the network starts to look less like some of the legacy boxes we all
know and love and starts to look more like a smartphone.
Need new functionality? Go ahead and install it instead of buying a new phone. And over time,
more and more physical networking devices – the visibility taps, firewalls, and other appliances –
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will all become just another SDN application. You’ll be able to select from multiple developers,
just like a smartphone.
So what are the advantages?
Beyond the obvious pricing advantages, a more programmable
and application-centric SDN network is more agile and available,
permitting you to respond more quickly and easily to changing
business requirements and demands. It delivers a competitive
advantage, an offensive weapon. Centralized visibility and control
over the network also helps with policy, security and analytics,
protecting valuable intellectual property and even your company’s
reputation. This is where your role as a CIO now intersects with the interests of your board.
What does Pluribus bring to the table?
At the risk of oversimplification, we are looking to do for the network what VMware did for host
virtualization, adding manageability and better utilization though Netvisor, our network OS and
network hypervisor. It also performs the same as that smartphone OS, abstracting the network
hardware from the applications. Netvisor is the ‘glue’ that enables true a more agile and available
network, one that can now leverage software development cycles instead of vendor-driven
hardware releases.
Our solutions, all based on our Netvisor OS, are in place in some of the
most demanding networks in the world, including Lucera's financial
trading cloud, where the sheer performance of our platform earned us
a place in their network. We are also in CloudFlare's network,
protecting some of the Internet's most critical traffic from DDoS and
other attacks. TIBCO has been accelerating deployments and reducing
“Their switches
are just
phenomenally
fast.”
Jacob Loveless,
CEO, Lucera
network complexity and risk by deploying complex messaging
applications on Pluribus hardware and Netvisor.
While our solutions are based on open standards, off the shelf hardware, merchant silicon and
open source software, all of which not only help keep prices reasonable but also ensure we play
nicely with others, there is of course some “special sauce” in there too that enables us to deliver
superlative basic L2/L3 switching.
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One unique aspect of the Pluribus solution is that the switches in a Pluribus network link together
to form a fabric-cluster. The fabric-cluster provides a number of benefits including a single point
of management, a distributed control plane ensuring robust, high availability and performance.
Another interesting aspect of the fabric-cluster is our ability to provide vastly superior security
and network visibility than most standard networks. Every switch on the network has visibility
into traffic across the entire network. This alone could pay for the network as much of the
visibility needed by many organizations can now be delivered by Pluribus, without resorting to
complex, expensive to buy and expensive to own TAPs, visibility fabrics or other networks built
solely to give you visibility into your existing network. Should you find you have had a breach or
some other sort of security incident, our ‘time machine’ functionality allows you to backtrack to a
given point in time, be it hours, days or potentially weeks, and see who was doing what to whom
on your network and when they were doing it. This capability is also, as you might imagine, useful
when troubleshooting application performance or security issues.
We also enable virtualization of the network, allowing the same infrastructure to be shared across
a number of users. This is useful in multitenant cloud deployments or when an organization
desires to segment the network such that different departments or divisions have access to their
resources but not those of other departments or divisions.
How does it work with my existing network?
Obviously, in the best of all possible worlds, one builds out the perfect greenfield network. Life is
seldom that easy, though, and most people already have a network of some sort. There are a
couple approaches to take. The first is to deploy the Pluribus solution into new parts of your
network – for example, the next time you deploy a new rack, include us for your Top-of-Rack
switching needs. Or you may opt to introduce SDN switching into the spine as you migrate to
40G. Yet another approach is to bake in SDN capabilities into new data centers when they are
built out. But in all cases, you need an SDN capable-switch that is still familiar to your networking
team.
A Brief Word on White-Boxes and Brite-Boxes
If you’ve followed the news, you’ve read about an evolving networking ecosystem different from
traditional vertically-integrated switches and routers, offering flexibility and release from vendor
lock-in and legacy buying cycles. Though not for everyone, as Gartner points out in a recent
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report, they are part of this year’s CIO conversation. Pluribus is the only SDN vendor that offers a
choice of branded turn-key solutions, as well as those by our ODM partners leveraging Netvisor
software.
What Now?
First of all, thanks for reading. If you would like to learn more, we invite you to request at demo at
pluribusnetworks.com/go/demo or visit our website at pluribusnetworks.com. We are happy to
discuss how SDN in general might fit with your network plans and how Pluribus can help.
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