Pluribus Networks on Thursday took the wraps off its new white box, multitenant data center gateway router that is optimized for public cloud interconnects.
The Pluribus Freedom Series 9532C-XL-R Gateway Router is a virtualized data center gateway edge router that uses Pluribus' Netvisor One operating system to meet the needs of distributed enterprise and service provider networks.
Pluribus claims the new router is the industry's first white box, multitenant data center gateway router, and that it delivers a high performance solution at one-fifth the cost of traditional data center gateway routers. On the hardware side, Pluribus competes with Cisco and Juniper Networks.
The white box router was built with commoditized merchant silicon and white box open networking hardware from Edgecore, which is a Pluribus partner.
RELATED: Pluribus Networks makes a move to the edge with its network fabric
"I think it's an interesting use case," said Lee Doyle, principal analyst at Doyle Research. "Software-based routing is in its very early stages, but it is a viable market opportunity. I think for this specific use case there are some real cost savings."
Pluribus took aim at data center infrastructures that are owned by regional cloud services providers, managed service providers cololocation providers and hosting providers with its new virtual gateway router. According to IDC, the cumulative spend for 2019-2023 on hardware infrastructure, which includes server, storage and networking, by the off-premises private cloud segment is estimated to be $50 billion.
Traditional edge routers don't typically offer deep slicing, which is beneficial for multitenant operations. With the new gateway, each tenant receives a dedicated, containerized, and hardware accelerated virtual router running open source FRRouting providing full isolation across the data, control, and management planes.
The new Freedom gateway router offers high-performance 32 x 100GbE or 128 x 10/25GbE in one rack unit with wire rate performance. The lower memory footprint supports up to 128,000 routes, which Pluribus said is more than enough to support the public cloud interconnect function.
On the flip side, the new gateway requires far less memory than a traditional edge router, which will holds up to 1 million routes to cover the full internet table, according to Pluribus.