Cisco is launching an analytics platform that aims to give channel partners greater insight across an entire data center in real time with plans of accelerating the adoption of newer technologies like software-defined networking.
“This will migrate customers into more modern technologies, from those traditional hardware-based systems into the cloud and software-defined networking-based systems,” said David Chandler, practice lead for the Enterprise Networking Solutions Group of World Wide Technology, a Maryland Heights, Mo.-based solution provider and Cisco Gold partner. “If a customer wants to do a migration from a legacy network into a policy-based ACI network, we would now have the information and the knowledge to go and make that successful.”
The Cisco Tetration Analytics platform, which the networking leader says took it two years to develop, can be installed in any data center with any servers, and with any network switches, according to Yogesh Kaushik, Cisco’s senior director of product management.
“It’s a completely open platform, designed to work with anything the customer is using,” said Kaushik, in an interview with CRN. “It’s designed to integrate with third-party tools, platforms, some of our own products like Cisco’s security portfolio, CliQr, ACI, other SDN controllers — tools to orchestrate workflows in public clouds like [Amazon Web Services].”
This is in contrast with the approach taken by Hewlett Packard Enterprise with its converged Internet of Things Edgeline system, which collects data in real time at the edge of the network. HPE executives have characterized the data center IoT model as being flawed because of what they have seen as a lack of ability to collect and act on the data in real time.
According to Cisco, Tetration is designed to give organizations complete visibility across everything in the data center in real time, gathered from hardware and software sensors. It then analyzes the information using machine learning techniques to address critical data center operations — such as policy compliance and application forensics — by providing application insights, automated policy recommendations and network flow forensics, the company said.
A single Tetration appliance can monitor up to 1 million unique flows per second and can search billions of events in seconds, the company said.
For greater technical insight into this new product, we recommend reading CRN’s article.