Pluribus Networks Teams Up with Celestica to Deliver New Switches

Written by Lynn Haber
January 23, 2020

Pluribus touts support for two new Celstica carrier grade white boxes, or switches.

Pluribus Networks, the open networking and next generation software-defined networking (SDN) vendor, says its Netvisor ONE operating system (OS) release 5.1 will support Celestica’s Edgestone carrier-grade white-box central office switch. This news targets telecom service providers looking to expand data center infrastructure to the central office, in line with an edge architecture.

Pluribus Networks says it has designed a system that is purpose built for distributed cloud and the edge.

Pluribus Networks’ Mike Capuano

“We’re bringing to the market with Celestica the industry’s first top of rack switch designed for the central office environment,” Mike Capuano, chief marketing officer, at Pluribus Networks told Channel Partners.

Thursday’s announcement includes three key pieces:

The Pluribus Netvisor ONE OS and Adaptive Cloud Fabric (ACF) release 5.1 supports two new Celestica carrier grade white boxes, one of which is an upper rack switch purpose built for the central office, regional and distributed data center and cloud networks. Celestica Edgestone is NEBS-compliant, top-of-rack white box switch that features an Intel Broadwell 12 core CPU, Broadcom Trident 3 packet processing chipset, all front panel access and dual management ports in a 350mm form factor. The Celestica Seastone2E is a standard depth 1RU switch based on the same chipsets and architecture and designed to bring carrier class features to standard data center environments. Edgestone can be paired with NEBS compliant compute and storage solutions to provide a complete distributed cloud solution for central office environments.
Pluribus Networks also integrated with the Red Hat OpenStack platform, a virtual machine, compute and storage orchestration system popular in the telco industry. Netvisor ONE and the Adaptive Cloud Fabric capabilities have been expanded to enable Red Hat OpenStack Platform orchestration of compute, storage and Pluribus-based networks for kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) environments. Telcos, mobile network operators and cloud service providers with Red Hat OpenStack Platform environments can take full advantage of the end-to-end fabric overlay automation built into ACF enabling fully automated virtualized networking that responds to dynamic compute and storage demands. Pluribus has also expanded the number of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform playbooks available to customers. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, combined with the ACF’s native automation, helps network teams reduce operational costs, human error and network downtime while increasing agility and speed to service. Pluribus Networks also is working with Red Hat on enabling Red Hat OpenShift for Netvisor ONE and ACF, with availability planned in the latter half of the year.
With release 5.1, Pluribus has integrated gateway vRouter functionality directly into the Pluribus Netvisor ONE running on the top-of-rack switch. This industry first collapses a previously external router into the border leaf node, enabling cost improvements and simplicity for edge data center deployments. This capability is valuable in combination with Celestica platforms which support the ability to scale to 128 vRouters, where each containerized vRouter supports a full Linux-based FRRouting instance per tenant for north-south traffic.

Last June, Pluribus introduced the world’s first white box multitenant data center gateway router, based on containerized virtual routers (vRouters), offering a step-function improvement in price performance for north-south data center traffic and cloud interconnect.

The overall Pluribus offer targets a broad set of the industry.

“That’s because it’s very applicable to modernizing a single data center but it shows its strength in multisite data centers or edge environments,” said Capuano. “If you look at the industry trends, no matter what vertical you look at – health care, MSP, or regional cloud service provider or telco – everyone is moving from central data center to distributed to the extreme of distributed which is the edge. All of those folks are candidates for our adaptive cloud fabric.”

This particular announcement targets telcos because Pluribus is introducing a new central office design and integrated with Red Hat OpenStack, which is popular with telcos.