The software-defined networking crowd is working hard to broaden the appeal of its value proposition in a bid to increase demand among enterprises. One of the vendors leading the effort is Plexxi Inc., which today announced a major update for its switching platform that promises to ease several important management tasks.

The first is the chore of plugging the system into an organization’s existing infrastructure, which often involves working with components that don’t support software-defined networking out of the box. Plexxi Connect, the third party integration tool included in the startup’s platform, has been augmented with pre-packaged integrations that remove the need for administrators to implement interoperability on their own. The list of supported workloads is limited to vSphere, the open-source Ambari orchestration engine for Hadoop and Nutanix Inc.’s Prism management system on launch, but more platforms can be expected to join the list in the future.

Once a company has completed the integration process, administrators can start looking for opportunities to improve network performance using a new traffic visualization feature that is also rolling out with today’s update. The capability makes it possible to individually examine the activity patterns of a workload without having to cut through operational data produced by neighboring applications. Plexxi says that the tool enables IT departments to make better use of the optimization features in its platform, which have been enhanced as well.

Its switching platform can now automatically provision network resources based on the specific bandwidth, performance and latency requirements of every workload in a data center. According to Plexxi, the feature makes it much easier to maintain service levels in big environments where upwards of dozens of applications share the same infrastructure. It’s geared mainly towards service providers that host workloads for multiple customers and have SLAs to uphold, but large enterprises stand to benefit as well.

Last but not least, the update brings is a new network segmentation capability that can be used to keep the workloads of different customers or departments logically isolated from one another. This separation makes it more difficult for hackers to spread malware and thereby helps limit the scope of breaches. Similar functionality is available from VMware Inc. as well a number of smaller providers such as Illumio Inc. and vArmour Inc., both of which secured funding in recent quarters.

Image via Plexxi