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Pluribus Netvisor Solution Brief
Copyright © 2014 Pluribus Networks, Inc. All rights reserved. Pluribus Networks, the Pluribus Networks logo, nvOS, Netvisor, vManage, vRender, PluribusCare, Pluribus Cloud and iTOR are registered trademarks or trademarks of Pluribus Networks, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks, service marks, registered marks, or registered service marks are the property of their respective owners. Pluribus Networks assumes no responsibility for any inaccuracies n this document. Pluribus Networks reserves the right to change, modify, transfer, or otherwise revise this publication without notice
Freedom Architecture Overview The Pluribus Freedom architecture presents a unique combination of switch, compute, storage and bare-‐metal hypervisor OS technologies, and is 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 system with hypervisor bare-‐metal virtualization capabilities of computing resources -‐ CPU, memory, and storage -‐ and merchant silicon switch chip. 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 a true 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/HW acceleration engine for application flows and network functions. The network switch is managed by a server-‐class control plane through multiple10Gbps high-‐speed connections, thus unleashing a new class of services and functions to run directly “inside” the network, such as 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.
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DevOps and NetOps now have an open architecture to program, virtualize and automate the network exactly like a server, with bare-‐metal performance efficiency, availability and security. Last the Freedom architecture is a full-‐fledged Ethernet Switching platform bringing an unparalleled level of network fabric automation, network-‐as-‐service virtualization capabilities, and unprecedented integration of network-‐host analytics.
Key Benefits of the Freedom Architecture
A Game-‐Changing Platform For Network-‐Aware Applications
The Freedom architecture enables a whole new class of innovative, transport-‐aware Applications tightly coupled with the network.
The Netvisor OS manages the L2/L3 network topology and it presents to the upstream L4-‐L7 applications a simplified, logical view of the fabric by abstracting and the physical network topology.
The Netvisor OS exposes to the applications powerful yet simple APIs, programmable or scriptable in any language of choice (Java, C, Python, Perl, etc). Through the API, applications can directly control the creation of virtual networks by allocating hardware resources such as ports, VLANs, VXLANs, TCAMs, bandwidth and more. Through the API, applications can manage and monitor flows (by re-‐routing, re-‐directing, dropping, accounting, sending to CPU etc.) across the fabric without the need to understand the physical topology of the fabric or the exact location of flows in the physical fabric.
In a nutshell, the Freedom platform gives full control of the Network to applications without the complexity of dealing with the L2/L3 physical infrastructure.
Enterprise users and Service Providers can turn the Network from a cost center into a competitive asset, to unlock software innovation on top of the network and consolidate multiple services in a fully virtualized, multitenant environment.
Network Architecture To Unify DevOps and NetOps Automation For Faster, More Efficient Delivery of IT Business Processes The Freedom architecture, combining the industry’s only network hypervisor (Type-‐1) with the server-‐switch architecture, entirely based on merchant silicon, is designed to unify DevOps and NetOps automation to drive ultimate network simplification and ease of management.
Freedom Fabric-‐Cluster Architectural Advantages The Netvisor® OS implements a distributed, peer-‐to-‐peer (no centralized controller) fabric based on compute clustering leveraged in the server and data based world for more than a decade. Pluribus Fabric-‐Cluster has the following architectural properties:
1. inNetworkTM Single Point-‐of-‐Management While each node in the fabric computes topology and state information with standard L2/L3 protocols, the intelligence is then globally replicated across all network nodes. The result is that every node presents a unified view with a single point of management of the fabric (including topology, port state, vlans/subnets, and physical and virtual hosts). The distributed nature of the cluster architecture is key to allow the architecture to scale into hundreds of node.
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Figure 1 -‐ inNetwork Single Point of Control
2. inNetworkTM Automation
Whether directly connected or across any existing IP network, Pluribus Freedom devices are capable of automatically discovering each other and form a cluster without any manual intervention. Each node has built-‐in full hot-‐plug capabilities to join and leave the fabric without any traffic disruption for the entire fabric. Fabric operations can then be automated from any node with traditional DevOps and NetOps automation tools or controlled by OpenStack. Moreover the Pluribus Freedom Server-‐Switch line provides built-‐in OpenStack controller options.
3. Cloud-‐Scale Analytics Engine Building on the Fabric-‐Cluster architecture is another distinctive, unique feature of the Freedom Platforms: Fabric-‐wide Analytics. The combination of Netvisor® multi-‐threaded architecture with the Server-‐Switch platform architectures enables a whole new level of network-‐wide analytics, never seen before on any traditional Ethernet switching platform. Without a separate monitoring infrastructure or external taps or flow collectors, the Freedom architecture provides deep, fabric-‐wide real time analytics or historical persistent logging scaling to hundreds of millions of flows.
Technology Highlights of the Freedom Architecture 1) Bare-‐metal compute and network programmability for L4-‐L7 applications and services to advance true
bare metal SDN/NFV/and transport-‐aware applications. Customers in fields such as financial HFT, CDN, big data, cloud and real-‐time messaging infrastructure are building a new breed of transport-‐aware applications.
2) The ability to operate physical and virtual infrastructure without the need to run separate underlay-‐
overlay networks, dramatically simplifying operations and reducing the time to deploy new applications with “wire-‐once and re-‐wire virtually” technology.
3) By leveraging high availability server cluster technology, Netvisor creates a fully automated and distributed fabric-‐cluster with the following advantages:
a. Applications and services deployed on top of the cluster have fabric-‐wide visibility without the complexity of having to understand the network topology.
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b. Any node in the cluster has the same view of the network and offers a single point of management with no single point of failure.
c. The clustering technology allows SDN-‐centralized controllers to overcome their intrinsic scalability limitations by allowing controllers to interact only with one node while the cluster hides the physical fabric topology.
4) Fabric-‐wide analytics -‐ You can monitor up to hundreds of millions of flows in real time, with the option
of up to 6.4 TB of Fusion IO storage, or keep historical logging with no performance penalty, including the ability to correlate host-‐network analytics, with VM granularity for any traffic including VXLAN tunnels. The network does not require separate specialized network gear for monitoring activity.
5) Fabric-‐wide flow programmability with bare-‐metal performance and scale -‐ Monitor, intercept, re-‐
route, or drop any flow across the fabric without the need to understand the physical topology or the exact route of the flow through the network.
6) Elastic provisioning of virtual services with bare metal performance -‐ The Freedom Server-‐Switch
platform is an ideal point in the rack to consolidate and virtualize orchestration services, for example, Red Hat Openstack™ or VMware vCenter ™ Server/vSphere®, as well as network services such as DHCP, PXE, DNS, SLB, Argus auditing software, Wireshark, and others. Pluribus is actively engaged with L4-‐L7 services partners to bring more services on the Freedom Server-‐Switch platform in future releases. Without knowing where an actual flow is, any node can program, trace, fabric, analyze and apply actions any custom defined flow (Figure 2 illustrates the concept).
Figure 2 – Fabric-‐wide Analytics
Another unique aspect of Pluribus Cloud-‐Scale Analytics Engine is the ability to integrate analytics data between the hosts and the network as depicted in Figure 3. Agent Software on the host is required to accomplish this task. (This feature is initially available with the NVOS 2.0 image when running OpenStack.)
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Figure 3 -‐ Host-‐Network Analytics
Ultimate Automation for Cloud and Virtualized Environments The Netvisor® OS, by leveraging its innovative network hypervisor capabilities, can virtualize, abstract, and pool fabric resources. For Enterprise private Clouds and Service Providers this translates into the ability to run virtualization directly inside the Network (inNetworkTM Virtualization), thus removing the requirements of running separate overlay and underlay networks. Netvisor® innovative approach creates a fully virtualized “Cloud Underlay”, which provides total flexibility to deploy and separately manage independent virtualization and orchestration stack on top of each tenant/virtual network (see Figure 4). Physical and virtual hosts can co-‐exists seamlessly without the need of complex-‐to-‐manage tunnels and gateway functions required in an overlay network environment.
Figure 4 -‐ inNetwork Virtualization
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Pluribus Freedom Platform Delivering on the Promise of Open Networking Pluribus Networks Freedom platform, completely based on merchant silicon hardware and open networking protocols promises Enterprise and Service Provider customers the following benefits:
1. An open, programmable platform to enable the delivery of innovative network-‐aware applications. 2. Freedom from proprietary network fabric architectural lock-‐ins and unification of both DevOps and
NetOps automation tools on a unified platform. 3. A cloud and virtualization architecture that dramatically simplifies and automates the delivery of
network-‐as-‐a-‐service (NaaS) in multi-‐tenant environments. 4. Freedom from all proprietary hardware device lock-‐ins and the elimination of the high-‐profit margin tax
on hardware from traditional networking vendors. Netvisor® can run on any platform as long as it is powered by an x86 CPU and an Intel or Broadcom (Trident family) chip.