Pluribus Networks Unveils Industry’s First White Box Multi-Tenant Data Center Gateway Router

Pluribus Networks, a leader in open networking and next generation software defined networking (SDN), today introduced the industry’s first white box, multi-tenant data center gateway router. Optimized for public cloud interconnect, Pluribus is delivering a high-performance, multi-tenant solution at approximately one-fifth the cost of traditional data center gateway routers. 

Regional cloud service providers (CSP), managed service providers (MSP), and colocation/hosting providers (Colo) are all investing heavily in private cloud infrastructure to support the migration of workloads from on-premises locations to hosted private clouds. According to IDC, the cumulative spend for 2019-2023 on hardware infrastructure (server, storage and networking) by the off-premises private cloud segment is estimated to be $50.7B. These service providers need a cost optimized solution that delivers high performance connectivity to the public cloud hyperscale providers while also offering deep network slicing for full isolation and security of each tenant.

Existing Data Center Gateways Don’t Fit the Bill

While many CSP, MSP, and Colo providers have deployed white box leaf and spine networks to cost effectively deliver east-west traffic, they still typically deploy traditional internet edge routers at the data center gateway location which sits at the border of the data center for north-south traffic. These edge routers do not typically offer deep slicing which is beneficial for multi-tenant operations. Furthermore, these repurposed edge routers are typically designed with expensive custom application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and enough memory to hold the entire internet routing table. For regional CSPs, MSPs, and Colos this expense, and the lack of sufficient network slicing, is no longer acceptable.

The Industry’s First White Box Multi-Tenant Data Center Gateway Router

Today Pluribus is introducing a new, more cost effective, fully virtualized data center gateway edge router, the Pluribus Freedom Series 9532C-XL-R. The industry’s first white box multi-tenant data center gateway router (DCGR) runs Netvisor ONE OS R5.1 and will be generally available in July, 2019.

Located at the edge of the data center this platform connects tenants and their workloads running on regional cloud infrastructure to public cloud and SaaS providers via high speed direct connections.  With the Pluribus solution, each tenant receives a dedicated, containerized, and hardware accelerated virtual router running Linux Foundation open source FRRouting providing full isolation across the data, control, and management planes. The containers can be provisioned, moved, and decommissioned with zero effect on the other tenants and limits can be imposed on the resources allowed to one or another container.  Migration of enterprise workloads to the private cloud service provider, along with high speed connectivity to multiple public cloud and SaaS providers, is simplified through completely isolated routing instances with no operational constraints or IP addressing reconfiguration required.

Disruptive Economics with High Performance

Leveraging the advantages of commoditized merchant silicon and white box open networking hardware from its partner Edgecore, Pluribus’ powerful Linux-based software delivers industry-leading performance at a fraction of the cost of traditional edge router solutions. The 9532C-XL-R offers up to 32 x 100 GbE interfaces or up to 128 x 10/25 GbE interfaces in a compact 1RU package with wire rate performance. The 9532C-XL-R is further cost reduced with a lower memory footprint optimized to support up to 128,000 routes which is more than sufficient to support the public cloud interconnect function but requires far less memory than a traditional edge router which will holds up to 1 million routes to cover the full internet table.

“Pluribus’ current MSP and CSP customers have asked us for a white box multi-tenant data center gateway router and we have delivered. This solution will help our customers deliver high performance public cloud connectivity more securely for their tenants, all while reducing the cost of private cloud infrastructure. As data centers become smaller and more distributed over the next few years this will become even more important,” said Kumar Srikantan, Chief Executive Officer, Pluribus Networks. 

“We are pleased with our Pluribus leaf and spine network deployed across four distributed data centers, soon expanding to six, with full network slicing for east-west traffic. With the addition of the white box multi-tenant DC gateway router we can now increase our footprint while delivering better control and security at a lower price to our customers – making us more competitive in the market,” Paolo Bombonati, Econocom Italia’s Chief Operating Officer.

“The Pluribus Data Center Gateway Router (DCGR) is designed to enable a cost-effective shared infrastructure for multi-tenant operators, using deep slicing to deliver control and security through the full isolation of tenants, and a single solution to manage workloads on hosted and public clouds. CSPs, MSPs, and regional Colos will want to examine the Pluribus DCGR for its open networking and cost points for public cloud interconnect,” said Michael Howard, Technology Fellow and Advisor, Carrier Networks at IHS Markit.

“There is a massive investment happening in private cloud buildouts. The new private cloud opportunity is built on a software-defined foundation, delivering a standard portfolio of cloud services, automation tools, and alignment with leading public cloud platforms,” said Rick Villars, IDC Research Vice President, Datacenter & Cloud.