Pluribus Networks Intros Cost-Efficient Gateway Router

Pluribus Networks, the open networking and next generation software-defined networking (SDN) vendor, on Thursday announced the Freedom Series DC gateway router, a white-box, multitenant data center router optimized for public cloud interconnect.

The Pluribus Freedom Series DC Gateway Router is a fully virtualized data center gateway edge router that runs the vendor’s Netvisor One OS R5.1, a network operating system optimized to meet the requirements for distributed enterprise and service provider networks. Pluribus traditionally is known as a switching vendor.

Pluribus Networks’ Mike Capuano

“When you look at what’s going on, we’re seeing pretty good growth in private cloud, much of which is outsourced, and we’re seeing repatriation from the big hyperscalers back to private cloud,” Mike Capuano, chief marketing officer at Pluribus Networks, told Channel Futures.

The new product is geared toward data center infrastructure typically owned by cloud service providers (CSPs) and managed service providers (MSPs) who deliver services such as private cloud hosting, SaaS or IaaS. According to IDC, MSPs will spend $37 billion in private cloud hardware between 2019 and 2022.

The new router features deep slicing for multitenancy. The white box is carved it up into 32 vRouting instances so each customer gets their own vRouter.

“This isolates all of the customer’s traffic, management and control data, which is ideally the security that customers want,” said Capuano. “This is all based on Linux-based open source software.”

The vendor has also right-priced the new offer. Typically, what’s deployed in this scenario is a high-end router, often overkill for the application. The new Pluribus Networks gateway router offers high-performance 32 x 100GbE or 128 x 10/25GbE for 3.2 Tbps in each direction. Memory is optimized for 128K routes in hardware.

“It comes in at about one-fifth the cost of a traditional data center gateway router that you might get from the bigger vendors,” said Capuano.

While many CSP, MSP and colocation 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 don’t typically offer deep slicing, which is beneficial for multitenant operations. Furthermore, these repurposed edge routers typically are designed with expensive custom application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and enough memory to hold the entire internet routing table. For regional CSPs, MSPs and colocation providers, this expense – and the lack of sufficient network slicing – is no longer acceptable, the vendor said.

The Pluribus Freedom Series DC Gateway Router will be generally available next month.