Solution BriefIntel® Network Builders Pluribus & Intel Cloud Services

SummaryThe “network is the computer” is a legendary catch phrase from the early days of networking when the industry was just starting to realize the potential of high-speed networks and servers.

Today, the “cloud is the computer” is more accurate as this network computing concept has evolved to the point where more companies and consumers are relying on private and public cloud services for access to data, applications and entertainment.

Pluribus Networks and Intel are working together to provide a new type of network computing appliance that fuses Ethernet switching, high-performance servers, and a hypervisor-based distributed network OS to provide true application visibility into the network and deliver better cloud service performance.

Pluribus* and Intel Team Up to Deliver Better Cloud Services

two are deployed as separate blocks of infrastructure with DevOps teams managing the servers and applications, and NetOps teams managing the network connectivity and switching infrastructure.

What is needed is more infrastructure integration that can lead to faster service response times and better scalability. Pluribus Networks is a leader in a new breed of network-computing infrastructure for cloud computing, which delivers an integrated and flexible combination of networking and computer processing power.

The company has been working with Intel since its inception in 2010 to build the F-Series Network Computing Appliance (NCA) based on the Intel® Ethernet Switch FM6000 for switching and the Intel® Xeon® processor E5 for high-performance computing, tied together by Netvisor*, the industry’s first distributed network OS and network hypervisor.

This solution addresses two key problems and helps to create a more scalable, manageable, and cost-effective infrastructure that meets the needs of both NetOps and DevOps:

• Bring better application visibility into the network. Using programmatic control over the network, Netvisor leverages its understanding of application needs to direct switching decisions being made on the network, with the result being better application performance.

OverviewIn 2014, the market for business cloud services is expected to total $13 billion with more than 60 percent of businesses using the cloud for IT-related operations.1 This growth is due to the inherent benefit of cloud applications, including better collaboration, better access to analytics, increased productivity, reduced costs, and faster product development cycles. The increasing adoption of big data is also a boon for cloud computing as companies turn to the cloud for cost-effective “on-demand” computing power to process this data.

One important part of the market is private cloud computing where companies deliver essential applications using cloud and Internet technologies. Gartner reports that private cloud computing is the “most popular form of cloud across various [industry] sectors”.2

But cloud computing service and infrastructure are areas of intense innovation and always increasing demands for more throughput and computing power and this is driving the development of networking and computing infrastructure that are able to keep up with its evolution.

Challenge Today’s cloud data centers are delivering services using high-performance network switches and virtualized network services applications running on Intel® Architecture-based servers. But these

• Similarly, the solution brings true network visibility to applications. This is due the fusion of switch and server components, which improves a wide range of capabilities, such as virtualization and QoS. It is enabled by the very high-speed control plane Pluribus has designed that delivers up to 100 times the performance of standard switching control planes.3

Both private and public cloud providers need to solve these problems if they are going to have the manageability and performance needed to meet the demands of next-generation cloud service market.

SolutionThe flagship Pluribus Networks solution for cloud providers is the Freedom F64 network computing appliance. The 2RU-high Pluribus F64 replaces a top of rack or spine switch, but goes beyond just switching with a combination of technologies that make the switch a true extension of the server allowing the two to work together to accelerate the integration of services and applications onto the network.

Here are some of the key elements of the Freedom F64 network computing appliance:

• Netvisor* OS: Netvisor OS is the industry’s first distributed network operating system with bare-metal hypervisor virtualization of CPU, memory, storage and merchant

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silicon switching. The Netvisor creates an application fabric that can host network-based services and applications such as NFV, SDN, orchestration and others. Key Netvisor services include:

◊ Clustering: Netvisor delivers Pluribus Networks’ unique software-defined fabric, which abstracts the complexity of the physical network so that NetOps can manage an entire cluster of switches as one logical switch.

◊ Switch Fabric Virtualization: Cloud NetOps teams now have the ability to divide the fabric into logical “containers” with a dedicated set of network and compute resources.

◊ Analytics: With its global view of all of the data in the network, Netvisor provides comprehensive traffic analytics without the need for a separate monitoring infrastructure (i.e taps or probes).

◊ Services Virtualization/Application Hosting: L4-L7 network services can run inside the network fabric either in virtual machines or high performance containers. Linux* applications also can be run on the switch in KVM or Bhyve virtual machines.

◊ Programmability: The use of open source/open standard software brings UNIX*-style, high-performance programmability and control of the network switch fabric.

• Intel Ethernet Switch FM6000: The low-latency switch controller provides wire-speed 10 GbE / 40 GbE, L2/L3 switching with a latency of less than 350 ns for the highest performance on the market. The highly programmable FM6000 switches are fully integrated into Netvisor and controlled and

virtualized like a NIC. They also have the performance to be used as an offload/hardware acceleration engine for application flows and network functions.

• Intel Xeon Processor E5: The server functionality is powered by either a single or dual socket processor and can be configured with between six and 16 cores.

• Storage: The network computing appliance can be configured with up to several terabytes of storage with options for Fusion IO flash storage and up to four slots for SATA SSDs/HDDs.

Future Collaboration With Intel

The Pluribus F64 is the ultimate platform for cloud computing applications today, but Pluribus is also working with Intel to adapt its core technology to evolve with key market trends. Already Pluribus has ported the Netvisor network hypervisor to be used with Intel® Atom™ processors in a microserver application based on the Intel® Microserver Reference Architecture. Microservers are optimized for lightweight, scale-out workloads for hyper-scale data centers.

The Netvisor is also an ideal OS and network hypervisor to be deployed in in-rack and build a distributed system across the hundreds of processor cores and network elements in a typical data center rack. Pluribus and Intel are working to make this happen within the framework of Intel’s Rack Scale Architecture (RSA). This holds the promise of delivering up to 100 network switching elements per rack, which means virtually no limit to the amount of processors or virtual machines that can be created in the rack making the infrastructure even more responsive to the demands of users and applications.

ConclusionIt can truly be said that the “cloud is the computer,” as demand for cloud-based applications, continue to grow rapidly. Cloud service providers – both public and private – need a new breed of infrastructure that tightly integrates switch and server components for better network services and faster rollouts.

Pluribus, leveraging Intel technology, has developed the industry’s first network computing appliance that delivers this integration. And the companies are working together to push this innovation into new form factor and applications to ensure that cloud services performance keeps up with the evolving market.

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For more information about Pluribus Networks, visit www.pluribusnetworks.com

1 20 cloud computing statistics every CIO should know; http://siliconangle.com/blog/2014/01/27/20-cloud-computing-statistics-tc0114/

2 Gartner Says Cloud Computing Will Become the Bulk of New IT Spend by 2016 http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2613015

3 Based on Pluribus estimate

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