Vapor IO and Arrcus announced a new partnership to package Vapor IO's Synse software, embedded tooling for creating real-time network observability data, with Arrcus' ACE platform on network switches. This creates a new Observability Data Plane for large-scale networks, improving the economics, reliability, performance, and environmental sustainability of the Internet.

Today's Internet is a "best effort" system cobbled together with networking equipment and infrastructure from thousands of vendors. With no agreed-upon standards for deep observability into the infrastructure, it's impossible to build high-fidelity models of the Internet to make highly-automated responses to actual or predicted changes in the conditions of the network, such as through AI and machine learning.

Large, complex systems in the physical world already benefit from digital twin technologies to improve their performance, reduce their operating and repair costs, and increase uptime. Through this partnership, Vapor IO and Arrcus are enabling a "digitallly-twinnable" Internet that will transform how networks operate.

"To create a self-adjusting and self-healing Internet, data must be part of an observability-to-action feedback loop," said Shekar Ayyar, Chairman and CEO at Arrcus. "We're thrilled to collaborate with Vapor IO to package their Synse server with the Arrcus ACE platform on network switches, enabling developers and operators to build digital twins with network observability. This unique offering will automate the management of the network and enable customers to meet business objectives and improve the customer experience."

By implementing an Observability Data Plane and building digital twins of the network, we can expect to see many improvements including:

• Performance: New classes of as-a-service applications delivered from the Internet, including computer vision, cloud robotics, Smart City and Smart Retail services, demand unprecedented levels of observability to deliver the needed levels of performance from the Internet.
• Reliability: SLA-backed services require real-time insight into network conditions to maintain promised service levels. These services also need the ability to build predictive models of performance so that SLA challenges can be mitigated in advance.
• Automation: Deploying and maintaining complex network systems requires continuous automation with high-degrees of precision. High-fidelity observability provides the data necessary to build autonomic systems.
• Environmental Sustainability: Energy conservation systems, including carbon-aware schedulers and network traffic management systems, require high-degrees of observability to optimize energy-conservation while maintaining performance targets.
• Resource Optimization: Making the best use of finite resources requires fine-grained observability to accurately model real-time tradeoffs. For example, an enterprise might have a complex set of business rules for balancing performance, reliability, environmental sustainability, and cost, which can only be applied with the right data in hand.

"Our industry requires observability or the Internet will never successfully support real-time systems such as 5G radios and cloud robotics," said Cole Crawford, CEO and founder of Vapor IO. "We must build digital twins of our networks, but digital twins require large amounts of high-fidelity data -and that data has simply not been available until today. Together with Arrcus, we're creating an industry-disrupting precedent, collaborating to build an Observability Data Plane for the Internet we need."