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March 15, 2022

Unified Cloud Networking Changes the Game

Published by Jay Gill

Today we announced our Unified Cloud Networking vision, the industry’s first Unified Cloud Fabric solution and our partnership with NVIDIA. This truly changes the game for cloud network operators.

Last week I made the case that cloud networking needs a new vision in order to meet two strategic goals shared by cloud operators:

  1. Transform cloud networks to become as agile, highly available and simple to operate as the hyperscale public clouds.
  2. Move rapidly toward a new, more highly distributed networking and zero-trust security architecture to address increasing cybersecurity risks.

Just as importantly, we need new solutions to overcome the obstacles that prevent operators from achieving those goals, i.e. fragmented networks and incomplete solutions for security, automation and visibility.

Today, I outline how we have created the vision and solutions to overcome those obstacles and meet those goals. In a companion blog, Alessandro Barbieri dives deeper into the challenges we are addressing and how we are turning the vision into reality.

Introducing the Unified Cloud Networking Vision

Unified Cloud Networking solutions build on the Unified Cloud Fabric (the next generation of our proven Adaptive Cloud Fabric) to unify networks across multiple dimensions – switches and servers, overlay and underlay networks, private and public clouds – with built-in distributed security, comprehensive automation and pervasive visibility. And Pluribus solutions are open so they work across hardware platforms and with any workload or virtualization environment. These unification dimensions and critical attributes are summarized in the figure below.

This vision won’t be realized overnight, so let’s look at the steps we are taking to get there.

Foundation of Unified Cloud Networking

Fortunately, we start from a strong foundation that already delivers key elements of the Unified Cloud Networking vision. The award-winning Adaptive Cloud Fabric, which has been deployed for years in mission-critical networks around the world, is a comprehensive and simple solution built on the Netvisor ONE operating system running in data center switches. It provides unified underlay and overlay networking with built-in SDN automation, end-to-end visibility and line-rate performance.

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Next Step: Unified Cloud Fabric

Now we are extending that proven fabric technology to servers, via data processing units (DPUs), and expanding its capabilities to deliver the next generation of the Adaptive Cloud Fabric, which we call the Unified Cloud Fabric. 

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We have ported the proven Netvisor ONE OS to NVIDIA Bluefield DPUs that can be inserted into servers (and expect to run on other DPUs in the future), and we are enabling highly distributed networking and security services on the DPUs, including microsegmentation and distributed firewalls. 

So now we have a common OS across open switches and DPUs, which allows us to unify networks that include both servers with DPUs and other servers and devices without DPUs. This is critical to provide  cloud operators with a smooth migration path to get to their target architecture based on distributed networking and security in DPUs while accommodating servers and devices that will never have a DPU, including special purpose appliances and IoT devices. This architecture also allows the fabric to extend to deep edge locations that may have only a single server with a DPU, eliminating the cost, space and power requirements of a separate network device.

With this next step, we believe we will have the industry’s only open, SDN-automated solution that unifies networking across data center switches and servers with distributed security, built-in automation, end-to-end visibility and hardware-accelerated performance.

Now that’s what we mean by changing the game.

We are about to start early field trials (EFTs) of this architecture, with the Unified Cloud Fabric running on NVIDIA DPUs, and a range of customers are already signed up, including a regional cloud service provider, a provider of specialized clouds for high-performance computing, a government cloud operator, a telco cloud operator, and enterprise clouds across multiple verticals. If you have an interesting use case and want to learn more about how to join the EFT program, contact us at www.pluribusnetworks.com/EFT. 

Unified Cloud Networking Evolution

As we look beyond EFTs and the first release of the new solutions, we will be adding more services and capabilities, such as Kubernetes network offload and hardware-accelerated IPsec encryption for east-west traffic, including site-to-site and site-to-cloud flows.

We will also be extending the Unified Cloud Fabric into the public clouds themselves, with a virtualized version of the Netvisor ONE OS running in the cloud and joining fabrics that can cross any number of distributed private, public and edge clouds.

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This is the full Unified Cloud Networking vision.

We are excited to move ahead toward this vision and confident that we are truly changing the game for cloud networking. Join us on the journey!

Learn more

Don’t miss two special broadcast events to learn more about Unified Cloud Networking:

Other resources: