U.K.-based Anana tapped Dell EMC open networking hardware and Pluribus Networks SDN as part of its data center modernization project. It’s the latest in a string of customer wins for Dell and Pluribus.

Anana provides a platform that helps companies orchestrate customer engagement including voice calls, text, email, social media, chat, and paper-based correspondence. Its customers include mega-retailer Marks and Spencer, Xerox, and mobile operators Vodacom and Three UK.

Anana wanted to automated infrastructure to unify its two data centers and provide more agile service delivery for its customers. It needed to be able to see traffic flows across the entire network to more quickly respond to problems, and it required network slicing across the control, management, and data planes to segment application and customer traffic.

Anana was already a Dell customer, “but they weren’t familiar with a lot of the open networking platform, and with Pluribus specifically,” said Jay Gill, senior director of marketing at Pluribus Networks. However, Anana’s networking team wanted to upgrade capacity across the two data centers, and “that became the opportunity to look at maybe we need to do something different,” Gill said. “One of the key things that became a focal point was automation. They’d virtualized the servers, they have tools for managing virtual machines, but the network has been hard to virtualize. So automating the network, virtualizing the network, was a key thing.”

Anana deployed Pluribus’ Linux-based Netvisor ONE network operating system and its Adaptive Cloud Fabric running on Dell EMC Open Networking Switches. This allowed it to create an SDN-controlled network fabric that federates together a large number of geographically distributed switches so that they appear as one logical switch.

This distributed approach eliminates the expense of multiple controllers. From any switch, the Anana team can see the entire fabric, troubleshoot the fabric, and update policy across the fabric.

Additionally, Anana tapped Pluribus Insight Analytics, which uses embedded Netvisor monitoring telemetry and packet flow data sources to enable visibility across the network.

“With Pluribus’ controllerless SDN and Adaptive Cloud Fabric, we can dynamically move virtual machines, applications and workloads between data centers, and do maintenance without impacting customers,” said Gareth Evans, Anana infrastructure manager, in a statement.

For Pluribus, this is “another proof-point that customers whose business is built on multi-site data center networks can improve their business agility, and it shows how networking across multi-site data centers can be simplified and automated in a way that people haven’t realized in the past,” Gill said.

In addition to Anana, Pluribus and Dell also announced customer wins including Italian kitchen manufacturer Scavolini and Amsterdam Internet Exchange over the past few months.