Pluribus Networks announced its vision and architecture for Unified Cloud Networking, featuring the Pluribus Unified Cloud Fabric. This architecture enables a unified networking model across distributed clouds, switches, and server-based data processing units (DPUs) with “zero trust” distributed security, built-in automation, and pervasive visibility. Cloud operators, including enterprises, cloud service providers, and communication service providers, now have a solution that enables them to evolve smoothly to a new cloud networking architecture and realize enhanced security, dramatically reduced complexity, lower total cost, and increased agility to safely accelerate their businesses at cloud speed.

Pluribus ported its widely deployed Netvisor ONE OS to the NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPU, which offloads, accelerates, and isolates data center infrastructure tasks, enabling the Pluribus Unified Cloud Fabric to extend across both switches and DPUs. This solution leverages the full power of the NVIDIA BlueField hardware accelerators and NVIDIA DOCA, the software development framework that powers BlueField. Initial use cases for the architecture include automated software-defined networki fabrics with distributed security services, including microsegmentation, distributed firewalls, and pervasive network visibility. 

Attributes of the Pluribus Unified Cloud Networking architecture and Unified Cloud Fabric include:

●   Unified and simplified cloud networks — Pluribus eliminates fragmented networks with separate operating models, enables smooth migration toward the new distributed architecture, and lowers operational complexity and cost by delivering a consistent network operations model across underlay (physical) and overlay (virtual) networks, switches and servers, and distributed clouds.

●   Distributed security without compromises — Pluribus enables network security to be distributed to the server level, including fine-grained microsegmentation and distributed stateful firewalls. 

●   Pervasive visibility —  Pluribus delivers built-in application-aware visibility and analytics for every application and every traffic flow, improving proactive trouble detection and resolution while eliminating the extra cost and incomplete coverage of separate monitoring networks.

●   SDN-enabled automation — Pluribus solutions incorporate industry-leading controllerless SDN automation to enable network operations teams to manage highly distributed networks with thousands of DPUs and other network endpoints while avoiding the challenges of integrating third-party automation tools or building and maintaining do-it-yourself (DIY) scripts.

●   Accelerated SDN on the host — Running the Pluribus Unified Cloud Fabric on the NVIDIA BlueField DPU extends the power and flexibility of software-defined, hardware-accelerated networking to every host with a DPU installed.