Pluribus Networks, working with Partners Vapor IO, Packet, and MobiledgeX, deployed its networking fabric across three Kinetic Edge sites in Chicago and says it achieved over six times lower latency with edge compute compared to cloud-based networking.

Pluribus is a founding member of the Kinetic Edge Alliance that Vapor IO launched in February. The group plans to roll out edge infrastructure in 30 metropolitan markets across the U.S. building on Vapor IO’s Kinetic Edge architecture. This uses software-defined interconnection and high-speed networking to combine multiple micro-data centers into a single, virtual facility. Chicago is the first Kinetic Edge city with three sites online.

For the test, Pluribus deployed its Netvisor ONE OS and Adaptive Cloud Fabric software across the three colocation sites in Chicago. Each site hosted a different white box switch: one from Dell EMC, one from Edgecore, and the third a Pluribus Freedom series switch. Each switch connected to a Packet bare metal server and a third-party spine switch, which connected into a third-party router providing ingress/egress at each Kinetic Edge site.

Pluribus created an SDN fabric across the three sites with two network slices to show the impact latency has on application performance. It configured one slice — the low-latency slice —to connect to a nearby wireless radio that was directly connected to the Kinetic Edge network. The second slice sent the application across the internet before being processed. MobiledgeX then deployed its facial recognition app onto Packet servers across the two network slices.

The test showed the latency for the cloud-based slice was 82 milliseconds while the low-latency edge slice was 13 milliseconds. “Call it six times better,” said Mike Capuano, Pluribus Networks CMO. “That’s what we wanted to highlight with this test to showcase the application performance at the edge.”

It also highlights how customers can unify multiple data centers using Pluribus networking fabric, Capuano said. All nodes of the SDN fabric federate into a single, logical programmable entity that stretches across geographically distributed locations. This means customers who deploy at the Kinetic Edge locations can unify their network fabric from on-premises data centers located anywhere in the world out to Kinetic Edge colocation facilities.

“We have customers typically in multiple colocation facilities, and some might be the more traditional, on-premises facilities and some extreme far edge sites like Vapor IO,” Capuano said. “These customers can stretch a fabric across all of these locations, which dramatically simplifies their operations.”