Pluribus Networks presented at Networking Field Day 16, a TechFieldDay.com event. Pluribus covered a lot of ground about their switching platform, capable of building a data center or campus fabric on whitebox switches.

However, Pluribus is about more than just switching. Ethan Banks was a delegate at #NFD16, and discusses Pluribus’ presentation of their Insight Analytics Platform. Insight Analytics is a network traffic analysis tool that, when paired with a Pluribus network fabric, can analyze every packet on the network on every port at line rate. Press play in the player at the top of this article for Ethan’s report.

For the entire Pluribus presentation recorded on September 14, 2017 from #NFD16, watch the video below.

I recently caught up with Cumulus Networks to find out how its Cumulus Express program is going. Cumulus Express sells white box switches that are pre-bundled with Cumulus Linux, the company’s network OS.

The Express program is a bit of a departure from Cumulus’s original go-to-market strategy, which was based around disaggregating the switch software and hardware. Cumulus still offers its software as a stand-alone package, but the Express program is designed to help customers get rolling with Cumulus more quickly.

I spoke with Cumulus CEO Josh Leslie to get an update on the Express program, what the company has learned, and how it affects its relationship with other technology partners.

You can get more information about Cumulus here. If you’re interested in network OSs, we have a page in our Virtual Toolbox with tons of information.

I’m Ethan Banks, it’s the 23rd of October 2017, and here’s what’s happening. I had a briefing with Kentik at Networking Field Day 16 back in early September. Kentik is a company providing deep analytics of network traffic and are also a Packet Pushers sponsor.

Kentik briefed the Tech Field Day delegation for about 2 hours. In this episode, I focus on specific Kentik features they discussed around network peering and planning.

To view this briefing in its entirety, watch the YouTube video here.

Barefoot Networks, the startup building the programmable Tofino switch chip, recently announced the release of P4 Runtime, an open source project developed in conjunction with Google to enable a controller to communicate with switches running programmable silicon.

In addition to announcing the availability of P4 Runtime, Barefoot and Google also tested the software using the open-source ONOS controller.

For more information, check out Barefoot Networks and P4.org.

The Packet Pushers had a briefing with Path Solutions’ CTO Tim Titus via a web conference on September 26, 2017.

Who’s Path Solutions? They are in the network management space, providing a tool that offers VoIP and network root cause troubleshooting. PathSolutions talks about “minding the gaps” making the point that their solution is supposed to fill in the gaps that general purpose network management systems leave behind.

In this briefing, PathSolutions gave us a live demo of their product to demonstrate its value. Ethan Banks shares his impressions from that demo.

For more information about PathSolutions, visit http://pathsolutions.com.

Cisco announced the ISR1000 today and there are some thoughts about this product.

Link: Introducing a New Era in Branch Routing – https://blogs.cisco.com/enterprise/isr1000series

Link: Cisco 1100 Series Integrated Services Routers Data Sheet – Cisco – https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/routers/1000-series-integrated-services-routers-isr/datasheet-c78-739512.html

Link: Branch Routers – Cisco – https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/routers/branch-routers/index.html

Background

6Wind has announced support for ARM CPUs in a briefing released today, Link in the show notes.

Link: 6WIND Announces Arm® Processor Support for High Performance Networking – http://www.6wind.com/news-events/press-releases-2017/6wind-press-october-10-2017/ 

Many people in networking may not have heard of 6Wind but their software is inside many Enterprise and carrier devices. They often license the software as a component that is widely used by branded networking vendors. The main focus in IPsec and SSL VLAN but the software is packet processing engine that can be used for many tasks. Its often used in SD-WAN products today

6WIND software scales across networking architectures with a choice of bare metal and virtual machine (VM) deployments:

* Server with standard NICs: x86 and Arm support for servers

* Server with Smart NICs: x86 and Arm support for servers and Arm and MIPS support for Smart NICs

* Appliance: x86, Arm and MIPS support

Why You Care ? 

Lots of vendors are moving their applications into virtual appliances. Its taken a long time for people to accept that a VM is acceptable. Now we are seeing diversity in CPU architecture.

I don’t see Enterprise using ARM for a while, thats probably too scary for most people,  but 6Wind has been strong in the custom device market for quite some time. So I expect this to be attractive there.

Mellanox & HPE have partnered to offer Ethernet Storage Fabrics to HPE Storage customers. If you have a Simplivity distributed storage you can’t use your legacy 3-tier tree design, and you can’t use a 4:1 oversubscribed Leaf/Spine. They just don’t work when the storage cluster reconverts.

References

Link: HPE OEM – Mellanox Technologies – http://www.mellanox.com/oem/hpe/

Link: Mellanox HPE Joint Solutions Reference Guide – http://www.mellanox.com/oem/hpe/rel_docs/HPE_and_Mellanox_Joint_Solutions_v1_10_11_16v3.pdf

Vendor Briefing Deck :  Mellanox HPE Ethernet Storage Fabric Briefing Deck 20170927

Pluribus Networks has partnered with D-Link to put the Netvisor OS on D-Link’s DXS-5000 open networking switch series. Ethan Banks shares the story, reported September 25, 2017.

For More Information

* Pluribus Networks Adds D-Link Systems as an Open Networking Partner