PLUMgrid
Open Networking Suite for Seamless End-user Experience

Given today’s software defined economy, the role of networking in running business operations is absolutely crucial in delivering smooth and seamless experience to end users. Organizations are plunging into cloud-based systems to stay ahead of the competition, and deliver truly differentiated services that can be created and deployed in matter of hours. Whether it is physical network infrastructure or virtual software, CIOs today are troubled with the networking aspect. Companies are in search of mission critical software solutions that can blend the requirement of traditional networking expertise with the collaborative ‘instant-on’ culture of DevOps. While OpenStack community’s development around computing, storage, and networking have enabled deployments around the world, organizations need as¬sistance in troubleshooting complex problems and this is where PLUMgrid comes in. Santa Clara, CA based PLUMgrid of¬fers its Open Networking Suite (ONS) platform to help enterprises and service providers operationalize their OpenStack cloud’s virtual network and Software Define Networking (SDN) deployments.

“PLUMgrid is built with a DevOps core, which we felt was the single best way to address the natural tension that exists between the requirement to deploy new services quickly and respond to market pressures while concurrently keeping those new services secure,” elaborates Larry Lang, CEO PLUMgrid. ONS featuring the unique Virtual Domains is a distributed software suite that gives cloud operators the ability to build a scalable cloud infrastructure. The platform significantly reduces the deployment time of OpenStack clouds and enables users to create Virtual Domains for applications and projects. Virtual Domains provide complete administrative control to its users in creating new networks, change configurations, and adds new networking services on-demand, without affecting other physical networks.

Reflecting upon the rapid changes taking place in the OpenStack arena Lang cites, “Continuous optimization is now the ‘motto’ for OpenStack SDN networks as the software evolves and advances magnitudes of order more quickly than networking hardware.” Having learned this, “Building networking infrastructures that are up-to-date has been PLUMgrid’s focus since day one.” As a startup comprising both DevOps and NetOps, PLUMgrid focuses on customer needs, business drivers and technological trends. To date, PLUMgrid has well over 70 deployed OpenStack clouds that span both Fortune 500 enterprises and service providers across retail, financial, media and entertainment and public sector verticals.

PLUMgrid is built with a DevOps core, to uniquely anticipate the networking hitches by creating a virtual, distributed architecture to translate clients’ policies into an OpenStack cloud environment

In one example, PLUMgrid assisted a retail customer in its pilot phase to build a private OpenStack-based cloud for faster time-to-market and lower overall cost. Using the legacy network solutions, the customer was facing challenges in terms of security, scale, and performance. By deploying PLUMgrid, the customer was able to isolate and micro-segment its data center by both department and data set. With the security policies enabled by PLUMgrid software, the customer implemented tight controls to protect sensitive data. Additionally, PLUMgrid allowed them to achieve the scale and performance they needed to deliver improved end-user experience.

Drawing a parallel between his love for music and ability to orchestrate the moving parts of the true SDNs, Lang states, “We believe in innovation, not just pumping out another ‘me too’ product.” Rightly so, PLUMgrid recently launched CLOUDApex—to visualize and monitor virtual machines (VMs) inside OpenStack clouds. PLUMgrid has been an active contributor to the Open Source and Linux communities to advance the virtualization technologies, which led to the establishment of its IO Visor Project. The company also continues to advance SDN technology through an ongoing collaboration with Linux Foundation. PLUMgrid, along with Cisco, Huawei and other bigwigs, is currently working to improve Linux kernel technology, which will facilitate innovations across analytics, container networking, security and much more.