Plexxi is seizing an opportunity it sees from the trend toward converged data centers, which allow more dynamic allocation of compute, storage, and networking resources.

Plexxi says customers are moving away from Fibre Channel storage area networks (SANs) and moving their storage traffic onto the IP network. But conventional networking approaches cannot handle the tenfold or greater increase in network traffic that scale-out storage produces on an IP network.

“Fibre Channel SANs are dying,” says Rich Napolitano, CEO at Plexxi, in an announcement today.

“This creates interesting challenges for traditional networks,” he told SDxCentral in an interview. “It is so clear to us this pain point has emerged.”

Napolitano says a Plexxi customer had deployed the Hadoop analytics database into its leaf-and-spine data center. Hadoop, in combination with the customer’s existing Oracle transaction database, created latency and network congestion problems.

To solve these kinds of problems, Plexxi developed its new Plexxi Connect integration packs, which work in combination with its dynamic network fabric control.

“The customer deployed Plexxi, bought six switches [which Plexxi manufactures], moved all of their services that were running Hadoop onto Plexxi, and removed all the conflict,” says Napolitano.

The new Plexxi Connect integration packs coordinate with VMware, Hortonworks, and Nutanix for managing data, application, and storage workloads across data center architectures for public and private clouds.

“We’ve signed Arrow; we’ve recruited 12 resellers; and we’re looking for any customer taking storage off of SAN and putting it on the IP network,” he says.

Perseus Deal

Separately, Plexxi announced recently that Perseus, a provider of Ethernet connectivity, chose Plexxi’s network system to expand into 11 new Asian markets for a total network scope of more than 75,000 miles.

Perseus wanted software-defined networking (SDN) tools to improve its network’s geographic scale, agility, and service offering capabilities.

Perseus deployed hundreds of Plexxi’s switches. On top of that, Plexxi’s software controller is doing traffic management, which can manage independent devices or manage the entire network as a whole.

“Our network is a federation of these devices,” says Napolitano.