eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
The definition of cloud is changing as hybrid multicloud and distributed cloud architectures emerging, and with businesses seeking to augment their public cloud deployments with a private cloud stack. Deploying a private cloud can be quite a significant undertaking as it requires procuring and integrating network, storage, compute, orchestration software and other technology.
One vendor that’s trying to make the process easier and much more cost effective by providing pre-integrated rack-level infrastructure is ITRenew, one of the world’s largest decommissioners of hyperscale IT infrastructure.
ITRenew Offers Webscale Technology
ITRenew works with many of the webscale companies, such as Facebook and Microsoft, as well as tier-two cloud-based companies like Uber and Dropbox, which refresh their IT gear after about only three years of use. ITRenew will decommission this equipment and then use these components in their supply chain to integrate them into new, recertified rack-level solutions. ITRenew’s “circular economy” approach is to maximize the lifetime of data center technology by giving it a second life.
The company decommissions, recertifies, and transforms IT equipment used by the cloud companies, and then deploys it into enterprises and service provider data centers. Most of the webscaler companies work with the absolute, latest cutting-edge technology. This is tech that hasn’t previously been available to power the private cloud needs of general enterprises and service providers. This makes the ITRenew option a viable one, particularly in this current climate of supply chain shortages that limits the availability of new equipment.
Decommissioned Webscale Equipment Offsets Supply Chain Bottlenecks
ITRenew takes the equipment and provides a fully validated, turnkey design, so IT pros merely need to deploy the rack. ITRenew must make several modifications so this hyperscaler gear can be deployed into standard colos or on-prem data centers. These modifications include upgrades to power, adding dual port NIC cards and of course testing at the rack-level with various software workloads.
Obviously, every environment is different so there may be some additional customization required. End-users can work with ITRenew to have that customization done at the factory.
This approach not only allows organizations to adopt the latest technology at a lower cost, but it also reduces the impact of manufacturing new equipment has on the environment. ITRenew’s focus is reducing technology waste, whereas most efforts to create “green” data centers are typically aimed at increasing energy efficiency and using renewable resources.
Pluribus Networks Now Integrated with ITRenew
Recently, ITRenew announced that Pluribus Networks cloud networking software solution is fully integrated with ITRenew. Pluribus makes an open, software-based network operating system that can run on “white box” solutions and is highly automated, like those used at the webscale companies. These low-cost, high performance white box switches have been appealing to webscale providers as they can run their own network operating system. However, most businesses would not want to use something like FBOS (Facebook OS) and Pluribus can provide an excellent option.
An example of a high volume of switches decommissioned by ITRenew is Edgecore Wedge100S-32X, which is based on Broadcom ASIC. Previously Cumulus Networks would have been an OS option, but with their acquisition by NVIDIA the relationship with Broadcom was effectively dissolved.
With this announcement these switches now can come pre-configured with the Pluribus Netvisor ONE Network Operating System (OS), which powers Pluribus’s Adaptive Cloud Fabric (ACF) controllerless software-defined networking (SDN) software. ACF allows the network underlay and the virtualized overlay fabric to be deployed across up to 100 racks in multiple data centers.
Pluribus Automates Complex Network Tasks
“Networking has been the Achilles heel of deploying IT infrastructure and network services quickly, especially across multi-site private cloud architectures,” Mike Capuano, CMO of Pluribus, told ZK Research in an interview. “Using Pluribus, you can simply type ‘VLAN create ID 110 scope fabric’ and it automatically deploys it on every switch across the fabric transactionally because our SDN control plane has a mini database in every switch. So you always have 100 percent consistent configuration.”
The ACF control plane is what holds the power of Pluribus’ solution. Rather than spending time configuring every box and deploying services in hours, days or even weeks, NetOps teams can deploy services instantly and focus on more strategic initiatives. Teams have visibility of every flow across the fabric with no external probes or additional infrastructure costs. This level of visibility improves both security and network performance monitoring at the application level.
With the ITRenew-Pluribus integration the company addresses one of the biggest problems in networking: automating data center fabrics. By fully automating both single-site and multi-site data centers, NetOps teams can deploy services faster and keep with up the growing demands of cloud computing.