Pluribus Networks developed a multi-pod architecture that integrates up to 32 switches into a unified fabric, expanding the scale of its Adaptive Cloud Fabric up to 1,024 nodes.

The company’s fabric manager portal “plays a role in creating the full mesh of VXLAN tunnels from every switch to every other switch, and mediating the synchronization of network updates to ensure every switch across the full multi-pod fabric always has a complete, up-to-date view of the entire fabric,” explained Jay Gill, senior director of marketing at Pluribus. 

“These techniques enable the distributed SDN control plane and distributed network database to scale beyond the limits of a single pod,” he added.

When paired with its Netvisor One operating system (OS), the platform can deploy a Layer 3 service across a 256-switch data center fabric with three commands, a feat that requires more than 5,000 commands in traditional networking architecture, the company claims.

With its architecture now equipped to scale to 256, 512, or 1,024 switches in a unified fabric, Pluribus Networks is eyeing deployments on a scale that is largely nonexistent today.

“Quite a few enterprises need more than 64 leaf switches in a single data center, as many as 256 in some cases, and more than two data centers,” Gill said. “So if they choose to unify several larger data centers into a multi-site data center fabric, that could easily require a fabric of 500 or 1,000 nodes.”

Cloud service providers are even more likely to require that scale for enterprises that need managed private clouds and mobile network operators that want to deploy smaller data centers for edge computing, he added. 

Trilogy Networks, which is part of a group of network providers in the Rural Cloud Initiative that aims to cover 1.5 million square miles of rural America, is using Pluribus Networks’ Adaptive Cloud Fabric to deploy a single fabric across its network, the company said. Some of the carriers in that effort “could grow to a scale of several hundred switches when fully built out,” Gill said.

Pluribus Networks earlier this year updated its software to support a pair of new white-box switches and integrated its Netvisor One OS with Red Hat’s OpenStack and Ansible Automation platforms. That resulted in improved network slicing and the first integration of the data center gateway router function directly into the top-of-rack switch, the company said at the time.