Pluribus Networks
Ruling the Network Virtualization Era

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has become a game changer these days—often regarded as a new approach to designing, building and managing virtualized networks. Pluribus, with their Netvisor software, is helping networks keep pace with fast changing business requirements. Being one of the leaders in performance-oriented network virtualization for private and public cloud data centers, “the past was all about swapping out line cards or chassis or dedicated appliances, but now we are delivering the networks our customers need with software,” says Kumar Srikantan, President and CEO at Pluribus Networks.

Pluribus was founded in 2010 by engineer trio—Sunay Tripathi, Robert Drost, and C.K. Ken Yang—to build intelligent, self-aware, and programmable networks by integrating more server style software and hardware into the network switch. “We believe in building more programmable and intelligent networks,” informs Srikantan. The company believes that SDN enables a “smartphone-like approach” to networking, solving CIOs’ key problems with highly adaptable and flexible virtualized infrastructure running on commercial, off-the-shelf hardware.

“Visibility into network traffic has been a surprisingly complex and expensive problem to solve,” affirms Srikantan. Often, customers end up deploying separate analytics networks with expensive taps, switching and cabling beside the existing network. “Most of the solutions available today can provide visibility either into the physical or the virtual network. Pluribus Netvisor, in contrast, stays ahead in the race by enabling visibility into both,” he adds.

Boasting a wide range of high quality products and solutions, Srikantan emphasizes Netvisor, the industry's first and only distributed bare metal network hypervisor based on an open architecture, as their lethal weapon. “With Netvisor, every server switch shares a view of the entire network when it joins a cluster. This not only gives fine grained visibility into traffic, but also enables a single point of management, reducing complexity and cost,” explains Srikantan.

Srikantan also brings in an interesting scenario where a leading financial service firm, Lucera, approached Pluribus with a challenge to streamline its traditional networking approaches.

“Our platform’s converged solution, where switch and server components are fused together in a single application, provided end-to-end performance advantages, and in a world where microseconds matter, that’s all it took,” states Srikantan. Pluribus’ enhanced network analytics capabilities also helped the client to track application performance issues while network segmentation capabilities assisted with regulatory and compliance issues.

With Pluribus Netvisor, it’s all software and an industry standard-based open platform that was designed from the ground up to support virtualization and run third party apps as network services

In 2014, Pluribus passed a significant landmark with the deployment of its Netvsior operating system on Supermicro’s next-generation MicroBlade microserver platform. After successfully raising a $50 million Series D round funding early this month, Srikantan foresees a huge opportunity for SDN in the networking landscape. “With customer traction increasing and deployments scaling, we are aggressively adding capacity in customer support and advanced services globally,” informs Srikanthan.

As for the future, the company will continue its vision to refine and enhance the Netvisor OS to reduce cost and complexities. “We will be focusing more on DevOps networking to take advantage of a highly programmable network platform that offers unmatched visibility into the network,” says Srikantan. Adding to that, the company also has plans to invest heavily in engineering, sales, support, and marketing.

Arriving at the right time when the industry is making a quick transformation from hardware to software-driven platforms, the big question here is to make the SDN implementations effective. “Of course, we think we have the answer, and it’s all about the SDN apps!” concludes Srikantan.