Plexxi, a pioneer of application-defined data center infrastructure, announced today that it will introduce a suite of new product capabilities through its Plexxi Connect Open Integration Platform. The new software integrations are aimed at delivering the industry's first 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.  As Cloud Builders design the infrastructure of the future, they are more and more designing around converged infrastructure architectures. Plexxi products are powerful building blocks to enable the build-out of agile and dynamic converged infrastructure that until recently only the largest Web-scale public cloud providers could deploy.

The new 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.

For the first time Enterprise Cloud Builders can build an open, converged application, compute, storage and network system, that easily integrates best-of-breed products. Plexxi's application defined networking solution provides customers with a single, integrated environment for simplified deployment, orchestration, management and control for storage and converged infrastructure.

The overall converged infrastructure (Server SAN/HCI) market is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 44.2% over the next ten years, according to Wikibon's Server SAN Research Project 2015. Much of this growth is projected to come at the expense of traditional enterprise storage, including Fibre Channel SANs.  Fibre Channel SANs no longer serve the requirements and demands of today's modern data centers that emphasize distributed applications, data, storage and workloads.

"Fibre Channel Storage Area Networks (SANs) are dying," said Rich Napolitano, chief executive officer at Plexxi. "Customers are moving to more scalable and modern Third Platform converged infrastructure designs, that move their storage traffic onto the IP network. Having the right network infrastructure is crucial to the successful deployment of these new designs.  Conventional networking approaches cannot handle the 10x or more increase in network traffic that scale-out storage produces on an IP network. Just as flash solved the disk latency problem for storage, Plexxi solves the networking latency problem for storage. Plexxi's new Connect integration packs, in combination with our dynamic network fabric, solve the networking challenges for modern CI for public and private clouds."

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. 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.

As an example, a Fortune 500 company deployed Hadoop into their existing leaf and spine data center, creating significant latency and network congestion problems. Their business critical Oracle environment was negatively impacted, which was unacceptable. Through the addition of Plexxi into their existing data center, their Big Data traffic was optimized while the latency and congestion problems for Oracle went away. This scenario is just one example of the power of Plexxi Connect integrations. Plexxi Connect delivers significant value across Big Data, IP networked storage and virtualization environments.

"Plexxi's integration with VMware and their dynamic network fabric together enable simplicity and agility in VMware Converged Infrastructure environments," said Steve Duplessie, founder and Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "By automatically configuring private networking paths to handle VMware vMotions, Plexxi helps organizations become more agile, enabling mobility and portability of their VMs in dynamic environments, within or between data centers, and without impacting other applications."

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. 

"We welcome Plexxi as a valued member of the Nutanix Elevate Technology Alliance Partner program and their recent validation as Nutanix Ready," said Venugopal Pai, Vice President of Strategic Alliance and Business Development, Nutanix. "This partnership means customers can now take full advantage of a converged compute, virtualization and storage solution through the Nutanix Xtreme Computing Platform while extending convergence to the network layer."

All products featured in Nutanix Ready have completed verification testing, thereby providing confidence in joint solution compatibility. Plexxi customers and partners can now take full advantage of a converged compute, virtualization and storage solution while extending convergence to the network layer.

Plexxi Connect integration packs for Hortonworks, Nutanix and VMware will be available in 30 days.