Interconnection service provider Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX) deployed Pluribus Networks’ SDN on Dell EMC Open Networking switches across 14 data centers in Amsterdam as part of a network modernization project.

“We believe this is another proof point of the growing presence of open networking and SDN in the market,” said Drew Schulke, VP of networking at Dell EMC, in a statement.

AMS-IX operates seven independent internet exchanges globally. The largest, in Amsterdam, consists of these 14 points of presence (PoPs), more than 870 autonomous systems, and more than 1,150 ports generating as much as 6.3 Tb/s of traffic during peak times. The company was looking to improve performance, automation, flexibility, and cost-efficiency for its Amsterdam platform.

After several proofs of concept with different vendors and open source software, AMS-IX chose Pluribus’ Netvisor ONE operating system and Adaptive Cloud Fabric running on Dell EMC Open Networking switches, said Bart Myszkowski, AMS-IX network engineer. Each of the 14 sites has at least two Dell switches with Pluribus software.

“The cost savings of open networking is certainly compelling, but for our team it is the fabric-wide visibility together with the SDN automation that make the Pluribus Networks solution so valuable to us day in and day out,” he said in a statement.

Pluribus’ SDN-controlled network fabric federates a large number of geographically distributed switches to appear as one logical switch, said Jay Gill, senior director of marketing at Pluribus Networks.

“AMS-IS is really lean and looks to use best-available technology and innovate in a way to keep a pretty massive amount of traffic flowing with the minimal amount of people,” he explained. “They’ve got to manage 14 points of presences around the Amsterdam area and their switching infrastructure with few people, and the Adaptive Cloud Fabric allows them to look at that network as one entity, to see it all at one time, to manage it from any location, and make changes — from a new connectivity slice to a new application or user — from anywhere.”

Pluribus’ SDN is unique because of its controllerless architecture, Gill said. “With this controllerless approach, there’s no SDN brain in the sky and no need to worry about the cost of the controllers and the redundancy of the controller,” he explained. "Everything is right on the switches in a highly distributed, highly resilient fashion.”

Pluribus’ fabric uses the processing power inside the switches, thus distributing intelligence to every switch in the network. This distributed approach to automation lowers costs by eliminating the expense of multiple controllers. And it means AMS-IX network operators often move around from site to site, and from any switch they can see the entire fabric, troubleshoot the entire fabric, or update policy across the fabric.

AMS-IX also uses Pluribus Insight Analytics, which leverages embedded Netvisor monitoring telemetry and packet flow data sources to enable visibility across the network. This allows the network team to analyze and compare actual versus desired performance and implement corrective actions, such as changes to policy or rerouting traffic.

Pluribus’ customer win follows a new product it rolled out over the summer: a white-box, multi-tenant data center gateway router that it says costs about one-fifth the price of traditional data center gateway routers. It targets regional cloud service providers, managed service providers, and colocation providers that would typically deploy traditional internet edge routers by Cisco or Juniper Networks at the at the data center gateway location — this sits at the border of the data center for North-South traffic.