Earlier this month, Pluribus Networks announced the launch of VCF Insight Analytics (VCF-IA), the company's revolutionary new flow-based, client-server oriented business intelligence solution for the data center.  What's interesting is that VCF-IA can be deployed on any data center network, regardless of manufacturer, providing deep insight into applications for performance monitoring, troubleshooting and enhancing the effectiveness of forensic analysis and security. 

To find out more and dive deeper into this new release of VCF-IA, I reached out to Mark Harris at Pluribus Networks.

VMblog:  Can you tell us more about the main business benefits organizations can expect to receive from VCF-IA?

Mark Harris:  VCF-IA enables business applications to run unconstrained. VCF-IA does this by bringing deep visibility at the application flow level to determine maximum performance parameters and help identify issues that may occur over time.  VCF-IA provides a critical operational view of the data center network for in-depth insight into specific applications for performance monitoring, troubleshooting and usage analytics. VCF-IA enhances the effectiveness of forensic analysis and provides additional details related to security and access. Further, since VCF-IA is a fraction of the cost compared to competing solutions, it can be deployed ubiquitously across the entire data center.

VMblog:  And who benefits most from VCF- IA?  From both an organizational and an IT professional standpoint?

Harris:  VCF-IA benefits all members of the IT organization that are tasked to handle these types of problems: 

• Support Application Availability and committed Service Levels (SLA)
• Decrease MTTR (events) - find/isolate problems faster
• Performance Tuning (i.e. latency study for Hadoop)
• Identify abnormal network usage, network abuse
• Quantify "Shadow-IT" growth (to Public Cloud)
• Identify key usage patterns (end-points, apps), capacity trends

VMblog:  How does VCF-IA stack up against similar solutions on the market? 

Harris:  Compared to similar solutions on the market, VCF-IA is significantly lower in price, dramatically easier to deploy and focuses on virtual flows rather than packets. It can be deployed with a Pluribus Networks fabric or in heterogeneous deployed by means of a SPAN or MIRROR ports.

VMblog:  Can you tell us how long VCF-IA has been in development? 

Harris:  The capabilities in software to translate network packets to information flows has been in development for the past few years. Creating an intuitive, easy to use GUI front end has been in development since early last year. 

VMblog:  The introduction of VCF-IA indicates that network virtualization is moving into the direction of operational insight and application performance optimization.  How will analytics ultimately impact the SDN market in 2016? 

Harris:  Insight and analytics are the critical missing components for modern data center networks. Connectivity without deep insight is like flying blind and hoping to be successful. Networking with deep visibility and analytics reflects the myopic approaches practiced in the past - circa 1996 - long before virtualization was even considered. Analytics and insight are the future of the information management function. 

VMblog:  What role do you see virtualization playing in helping the software-defined data center evolve over the next few years?

Harris:  Virtualization of every key component (Compute, Storage, Networking and Power/Cooling) is the foundation of the software-defined data center (SDDC), otherwise known as the private cloud. As companies begin to realize they can now enjoy the benefits demonstrated by public cloud providers, but at the fraction of the cost by internally deploying the right combination of elastic technologies, they build their own private cloud. As the private cloud (also known as SDDC) has now become reality, it is adopted by more businesses, which in turn inhibits the public cloud market growth. 

VMblog:  So what's next for Pluribus Networks? 

Harris:  Pluribus Networks is currently focusing our attention on expansion in product, company and geography. The next few years will be a pivotal step for Pluribus Networks as we define ourselves a market leader in the space and demonstrate why our solutions and approach provide technology organizations better business value than our competitors. 

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Once again, I'd like to thank Mark Harris, VP at Pluribus Networks, for taking time out to speak with VMblog.