PLUMgrid

PLUMgrid, founded in 2011 by former Cisco engineers Awais Nemat and Pere Monclus, established itself as a key player in the software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) market. The company emerged from stealth in June 2013 with $10.7 million in funding to develop solutions for the burgeoning SDN landscape. The founders' background at Cisco, working on high-profile projects like the Catalyst 6500 and Nexus 7000 switches, provided them with deep insights into enterprise networking challenges, directly influencing PLUMgrid's direction. Over its lifetime, the company raised approximately $46 million from investors including Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, Longworth Venture Partners, and Qualcomm Ventures.

PLUMgrid specialized in providing secure and scalable virtual network infrastructure for container and OpenStack clouds. The company's core offering was the PLUMgrid Open Networking Suite (ONS), a software-only suite that delivered virtual networking for OpenStack clouds, supporting various distributions like Red Hat, Canonical, and SUSE. This suite enabled enterprises and service providers to create private Virtual Domains, ensuring isolation, security, and policy enforcement across different tenants. A key differentiator for PLUMgrid was its IO Visor technology, an I/O processor within the Linux kernel that managed virtual domains for network virtualization, monitoring, and security, which was later donated to The Linux Foundation. This approach contrasted with competitors by not relying on a centralized SDN controller. The business model focused on providing these software networking solutions to enterprises and service providers deploying hybrid data centers, allowing them to connect applications and workloads across hypervisors, bare metal, and container-based architectures. The company also developed CloudApex, a monitoring tool offering a real-time, graphical view of network resources and analytics to troubleshoot issues.

In June 2015, industry veteran Larry Lang was appointed CEO to steer the company's next growth phase, with founder Awais Nemat moving to the chairman of the board position. Despite its technology and market presence, PLUMgrid ceased independent operations in December 2016. VMware acquired certain intellectual property assets and hired a number of its employees. The acquisition aimed to bolster VMware's own NSX software-defined networking platform and its strategy for container networking. Following the acquisition, PLUMgrid was shut down.

Keywords: PLUMgrid, software-defined networking, SDN, network functions virtualization, NFV, OpenStack networking, virtual network infrastructure, IO Visor, VMware acquisition, Pere Monclus, Awais Nemat, data center virtualization, cloud networking, container networking, virtual domains, multi-tenancy networking, network security, network monitoring, CloudApex, Open Networking Suite