Pluribus Networks has added certified support for the Open Compute Project (OCP)-compatible 10G/40G AS5712 and AS6712 white box switches from Edgecore Networks Corp., further building out the ecosystem around its Open Netvisor Linux (ONVL) operating system.

ONVL is a software-defined approach to high-speed switching that runs on white box hardware from Dell Technologies Inc., Super Micro Computer Inc. and now Edgecore. The company claims its software enable white-box servers to be used in mission-critical IT infrastructures with performance and features that are comparable to those of specialized network switches, while also include reporting and management features for fabric automation and security and performance analysis. The platform also supports VMware Inc.’s vSphere virtualization platform as well as the popular Puppet and Ansible automation tools.

Pluribus positions its switching software as a low-cost alternative to proprietary network infrastructure that includes features that hardware-defined switches lack, particularly in the area of management. The company’s Virtualization-Centric Fabric (VCF, see image above) is a distributed architecture that uses clustering to present an open, standards-based Ethernet fabric as one logical entity that can be flexibly allocated and expanded as applications require. Pluribus bases its software-defined architecture on OCP, a Facebook-led initiative to build a wide range of software-defined infrastructure components.

Pluribus said Enterprise-Ready ONVL is fully compatible with existing layer-2 and layer-3 switching protocols. The company claims to be the only vendor of a white-box network operating system to combine switching and network analytics in a single system. Software-defined features enable switches to be added to or removed from a network without disruption, the company says.

“Enterprises used to believe that they had to buy Cisco [Systems Inc.] or Juniper [Networks Inc.] switches for performance, and that anything else is inferior,” said Mark Harris, vice president of marketing at Pluribus. “We’re saying that enterprise switches and white boxes are now equivalent.”

Software-defined switches have been widely regarded as under-performing switches based on custom silicon, but Pluribus says it’s licked that problem. This week the company plans to release the results of tests performed by Tolly Enterprises LLC that support its claims. The research results were not provided at the time of this announcement.

Pluribus, which has raised $97 million in five rounds from 10 investors, according to CrunchBase, says its software can reduce the cost of a typical layer 2 or layer 3 switch by about half while also giving enterprises the option of choosing from several hardware suppliers. Equally important is that it provides analytics and management features that enable users to allocate resources for more flexibly than they can with hard-wired switches. Such visibility is useful for converged, Hadoop and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments, as well as for security analytics.

“Visibility is one of the main problems with existing switches,” Harris said. “It’s become fiscally irresponsible not to consider SDN.”

The new software is available now.

Image courtesy Pluribus Networks