SDN start-up Plexxi this week unveiled products designed to ease the construction of private clouds.
The company rolled out a new Ethernet switch, based on Broadcom’s latest Tomahawk silicon, and a software suite that includes an SDN controller, and automation and orchestration tools to enable companies to build private clouds that emulate the ease of use of public clouds. Target markets for the new products are content distribution, high frequency trading, enterprise and government.
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The software is the Plexxi 2.2 Software Suite. It includes the Plexxi Network OS, the Plexxi Control application-defined fabric controller, and Plexxi Connect workflow orchestration and automation tool set.
Among other attributes, the software features automated orchestration of VMware and OpenStack environments with discovery of the virtualized environment, zero-touch provisioning and configuration of new data and application-specific workloads. Plexxi 2.2 also features data replication, service chaining, and support for low latency Ethernet and non-Ethernet workloads like FibreChannel and Infiniband traffic.
The second product, the Plexxi Switch 3, delivers 10/25/40/50/100G Ethernet connectivity. The 1RU switch features 3.2Tbps of switching capacity – 32 100G ports – and less than 400 ns of latency.
The Plexxi Switch 3 costs less than $1,000 per 100G port, excluding optics. It will be available in January.
Plexxi 2.2 Software Suite costs $5,000 per switch. It is available now.
Market tracker IHS predicts “in-use” SDN Ethernet switches and controllers will top $1.4 billion this year, nearly doubling from last year.
