Pluribus, Dell tackle IoT video security with SDN

Pluribus Networks and Dell Technologies’ latest SDN product targets IoT video networks using open white box switching and distributed multicast forwarding technology.

The Pluribus IoT Video Security Fabric is available now, and is in use by a municipal government in a “major European capital city,” according to Jay Gill, senior director of marketing at Pluribus Networks. “It’s targeted at the networks that support IoT video, security, and surveillance solutions. And the main benefit of it is making them a lot more efficient and cost effective to deploy.”

The IoT video security product is based on Pluribus’ Adaptive Cloud Fabric — this federates multiple, geographically distributed switches so that they appear as one logical switch. “And we’ve added some secret sauce to that, which is a unique, SDN-enabled multicast technology,” Gill said.

SDN-Enabled Multicast

Video networks — especially those with hundreds of IoT-enabled cameras streaming higher-definition video, like the European city customer — require massive network capacity. “And whenever an application becomes the capacity driver, it puts a lot of stress on the cost of that network and people start to look for ways to get more capex efficient,” Gill said.

Plus, in addition to simply streaming video from a camera to a receiver, the customer may need more than one receiver for redundancy purposes and may have geographically separated monitoring sites for analyzing the video. “Also, increasingly there’s collection and processing of video, including things like artificial intelligence-aided processing to identify anomalies, and that means video streaming has to get to those storage and processing sites,” Gill said. If customers don’t use multicast technology, all of these video streams have to be sent separately.

Multicast technology makes these video networks more efficient — but typically it’s very complex and only runs on expensive routers, Gill said. “This has been a roadblock for a lot of organizations.”

The new IoT Video Security Fabric aims to solve this capex and complexity problem by running on white box switches over any existing transport network. It also uses Pluribus’ SDN to automate the multicast for high performance and bandwidth efficiency. “And what that allows us to do in this case is to have a very smart way of replicating traffic where it needs to be,” Gill said.

Additionally, the fabric has segmentation built in, which is important because IoT devices are inherently difficult to secure and large numbers of these devices expands the potential attack surface for hackers. Segmentation isolates IoT video streams from other applications and allows customers to more securely share the network infrastructure.

Pluribus, Dell Deployment

“The most important thing that the [customer] was looking for was to be very efficient about using this network without a lot of redundant capital investment,” Gill said. The European city had an existing network of cameras and access switches in place to collect video streams. “They wanted to preserve as much of that investment as possible, so we didn’t have to replace any of those, and we were able to use their existing underlying network infrastructure as well. All we were replacing was kind of a core network in the middle.”

This new core network includes 10 sites with 30 Dell open networking switches, all connected by 100-gigabit links over existing network fiber.

“The other part of being very efficient for them was they wanted to not just make this video network a single-purpose network,” Gill said. “They wanted this to become the backbone of the enterprise network they build for the city government.” And because of this, using segmentation to securely isolate the IoT video traffic from other applications was very important, he added.

The city also uses Pluribus’ unified management, automation, and analytics platform, which further reduces complexity by automating network provisioning and operations, Gill added.

Growing Video Surveillance Market

While the initial customer is a city, Pluribus and Dell say they see increased adoption of IoT video security across both public and commercial market sectors including transportation, utilities, and campus environments such as those in enterprise, government, and education. Dell projects the global video surveillance market to grow from $52.6 billion in 2019, to $64 billion this year.

“In these environments, Pluribus’ ability to automate the deployment of unified, application-aware network fabrics across multiple sites using the Adaptive Cloud Fabric delivers great value by simplifying network operations and reducing operational costs,” said Paul Parker-Johnson, chief analyst at ACG Research, in a statement. Dell’s open network switching hardware and Pluribus’ open Linux-based software “provides additional flexibility and cost efficiencies,” he added.

This is the latest in a series of customers wins for Pluribus and Dell over the past several months that include Anana, Italian kitchen manufacturer Scavolini, and the Amsterdam Internet Exchange.

―SDX Central