Pluribus Networks said its Adaptive Cloud Fabric virtualized architecture, launched today, makes it easier to transition to software-defined data centers. The technology virtualizes data center switches and operates without a controller.

While a virtualized fabric has always been central to Pluribus’ technology, the new offering will make managing next-generation private and hybrid clouds easier, the company said.

Adaptive Cloud Fabric is a peer-to-peer distributed fabric that clusters all switches into a unified operating domain. This allows them to operate and be managed as a single virtualized switch. All switch-to-switch communications, configuration, policies, and state information is dynamically updated across the fabric.

The fabric integrates and distributes intelligence and analytics and provides visibility across the network. This improves network and application performance management, speeds troubleshooting, and improves operational and security intelligence, the company said.

This distributed fabric is built on Netvisor network virtualization software, written by Pluribus. This software runs on open networking hardware and virtualizes the switch. Switch virtualization decouples network resources from the underlying hardware, creating multiple network containers on a single device.

This virtualized switch allows the Adaptive Cloud Fabric to operate without a controller.

“You take the notion of a controller, and you physically distribute it across all of the switches,” said Steven Shalita, vice president, marketing and business development, at Pluribus Networks. “The switches are communicating with each other in this distributed architecture. The distributed architecture gives you scale, resiliency, and policy across all member switches.”

It can be used to construct public as well as private clouds, or targeted to specific racks, pods, server farms, or hyperconverged infrastructure. The Adaptive Cloud Fabric enables the enterprise private cloud to extend intelligence from the data center to the public cloud hosting environment with the use of vPort technology.

The bottom line, Shalita said, is that the Adaptive Cloud Fabric makes is simpler to transition to a software-defined data center.

“The fact that we virtualized the switch — nobody does that,” Shalita said. “The fact that we virtualized the fabric — nobody has done that. We’ve taken high-speed cluster computing and storage technology and married it into the network. It radically changes the architecture and how to achieve software-defined data centers. It’s simple to deploy, simple to manage. It’s all about simple because that’s the number one complaint about SDN, that it’s not simple.”