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.