Cisco has unveiled Tetration Analytics, a solution that helps customers gain “complete visibility” across everything in the data center–all in real time. Using “advanced machine learning techniques” this new platform analyzes information gathered by telemetry from hardware and software sensors. Tetration Analytics also addresses critical data center operations such as policy compliance, application forensics, and moving to a whitelist security model. The new platform will be a full rack appliance deployed on premise at the customer’s data center.
Cisco has unveiled Tetration Analytics, a solution that helps customers gain “complete visibility” across everything in the data center–all in real time. Using “advanced machine learning techniques” this new platform analyzes information gathered by telemetry from hardware and software sensors. Tetration Analytics also addresses critical data center operations such as policy compliance, application forensics, and moving to a whitelist security model. The new platform will be a full rack appliance deployed on premise at the customer’s data center.
Cisco says that their new Tetration Analytics platform will give IT managers a deep understanding of their data center–which will drastically simplify its operational reliability–giving them the ability to:
- Understand what applications are dependent on each other throughout their data center and into the cloud
- Move from reactive to proactive; make informed operational decisions and validate the effect of policy changes before they are implemented
- Search across billions of flows in less than a second using Tetration’s forensics search engine and user interface
- Continuously monitor application behavior to quickly identify any deviation in communication patterns
To give pervasive and complete visibility across the data center, Tetration uses server software sensors with very low overhead, network hardware sensors that monitor packet-by-packet meta data, or both. Additionally, Tetration leverages advanced data center analytics in real time to give IT admins actionable and easy-to-understand visuals: application insights, automated whitelist policy recommendations, policy simulation and impact analysis, compliance management, and network flow forensics.
Moreover, Tetration Analytics allows organizations to see what has happened in the past, what is happening in the now, and model what can happen:
- Model a change before it’s executed to understand the impact on applications to enable informed operational decisions;
- Validate that policy changes have actually been applied and taken full effect;
- Do real-time and historical policy simulation; replay what happened in the network at any time, with long term data storage capabilities.
How Tetration Analytics works:
- Sensors are installed software on end hosts (the first release currently supports only Linux and Windows server hosts); either on a virtual machine or bare metal servers.
- Hardware sensors are embedded in the ASICs of Cisco Nexus 9200-X and Nexus 9300-EX network switches to collect flow data at line rate from all the ports.
- A single Tetration appliance will monitor up to one million unique flows per second.
- Software and hardware sensors both communicate the flow information (in real time) to the Tetration Analytics platform.
- The platform can be installed in any data center with any servers and any network switches.
In addition, Cisco’s touts their new Tetration platform as a “one-touch” appliance: the servers and switches come prewired and the software is pre-installed, making the initial setup a breeze.
Availability
The Cisco Tetration Analytics is slated for a release sometime in July, 2016.
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