SDN Monitoring Enabled With Arista-ExtraHop Solution
SDN Monitoring Enabled With Arista-ExtraHop Solution by UCStrategies Staff
A joint network visibility and monitoring solution has been announced through the Arista Networks-ExtraHop partnership; this will support software-defined data center networks.
The new integrated solution, which is called ExtraHop-Arista Persistent Monitoring Architecture, provides call real-time and cross-tier visibility into dynamic or virtualized data center environments. The senior vice president of marketing and business development at ExtraHop, Erik Giesa, said that the new architecture is somewhat different from former traditional network monitoring tools and is able to offer visibility over a number of layers of abstraction in a data center.
Giesa said: “The whole principle of [software-defined networking] is network abstraction, so that you can drive greater centralized intelligence and programmability. But we already have server and application abstraction, storage and database abstractions, and now we have network abstraction. So with more layers of abstraction and the ability to program ... the old ways [of monitoring] just don't work.”
According to Giesa, the ExtraHop-Arista Persistent Monitoring Architecture is based on Arista's SDN and cloud networking architecture and ExtraHop's Context and Correlation Engine (CCE).
The Arista architecture is able to direct all network traffic to ExtraHop's CCE, which is able to analyze that traffic data in real-time. The solution is able to adapt to alterations within the data center and can find, class and map any dependencies which may arise, whilst monitoring and keeping track of performance at the same time. Giesa added that auto-discovery of virtual and physical servers is also possible.
Giesa said: “As product traffic is happening, at the same time, a copy of that traffic is being sent to [ExtraHop] for real-time analysis. We are down to the second-level. This isn't a delay. What you see in our UI is what’s actually going on in the environment right now.”
Visibility into the deployment and migration of virtual machines over the data center is also possible with the ExtraHop-Arista Persistent Monitoring Architecture.
Integrated Archive Systems is a Palo Alto, California-based solution provider and ExtraHop partner, and the vice president of engineering at that company, John Woodall, noted that “incredible visibility” will be put into SDN environments through the Persistent Monitoring Solution.
Woodall stated: “To me, this is a very elegant way of tying meaningful data off of my network back into my network – kind of a closed-loop system, in a sense – and to have my SDN paradigm have a much richer feature set of data to use to make intelligent decisions. That's where I see the value of this partnership.”
The director of channel sales at ExtraHop, Tom Estep, commented that the company has more than 60 solution providers around the world. The company’s partnership with Arista and joint architecture with that company means that they will both be able to move confidently into the SDN space, distributing a pre-integrated monitoring solution.
Estep said: “Arista's channel is really activating and lighting up at the same pace that ours is, and we are growing our channel resources and sales resources and engineering resources at a very similar pace. So the timing of this joint solution, and being able to go to our mutual partners to deliver this message about how you can sell ExtraHop and Arista together ... and sell a solution that already snaps together, and sell it with confidence, is a really powerful message.” (CY) Link