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Data center infrastructure specialist Plexxi announced the introduction of a suite of new product capabilities through its Connect Open Integration Platform.
The new software integrations are aimed at delivering a workload-responsive, programmable network fabric for converged infrastructure (CI) and storage environments.
This software release enables cloud builders to build cloud infrastructure in new ways, with Plexxi’s products helping to enable the build-out of converged infrastructure.
“Traditional networking approaches are static and present bottlenecks to scale-out data center models, because of their rigid physical topologies, as well as their lack of data workload awareness and responsiveness,” Rich Napolitano, CEO of Plexxi, told eWEEK. “Until now, networks have been designed specifically for north-south traffic of the Platform 2 (client/server) era. Networks have not been constructed to support heavily distributed Platform 3 traffic and workloads, and have faced significant scaling, performance and congestion problems.”
Napolitano said just as flash solved the disk latency problem for storage, Plexxi solves the networking latency problem for storage.
“Every organization has unique business requirements, and they want the ability to customize and integrate technologies via an open platform, creating a building block approach to data center design,” he explained. “Plexxi Connect integrations, part of today’s announcement, deliver on this trend.”
The software releases include product integrations with VMware, Hortonworks and Nutanix for managing data, application and storage workload traffic across next-generation, distributed, scale-out data center architectures for public and private clouds.
Plexxi Connect integration packs for Hortonworks, Nutanix and VMware will be available in 30 days, and in conjunction with the release of the Nutanix integration, Plexxi announced that the company’s Switch 2 product series has been verified in networking and security and achieved Nutanix Ready status.
“Organizations are looking to consume technology as cloud based services, from both private and public clouds,” Napolitano said. “Converged infrastructure represents an important shift in the way new data, applications and storage are being implemented and consumed. Applications and storage will be deployed as scaled-out resources across any rack, any row or any data center. Supporting this new model requires a next generation network, which is where Plexxi comes in.”
The overall converged infrastructure (Server SAN/HCI) market is estimated to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 44.2 percent over the next ten years, according to Wikibon’s Server SAN Research Project 2015.
The report noted much of this growth is projected to come at the expense of traditional enterprise storage, including Fibre Channel SANs.