Pluribus Announcing Analytics Solution: inNetwork Analytics

Pluribus Networks, Inc., the company that brings together compute, network, storage, and virtualization into a single platform, announced its analytics solution, inNetwork Analytics, which empowers both NetOps and DevOps with faster time-to-problem resolution and seamless visibility into both overlay and underlay networks.

The Freedom Analytics solution, leveraging the company’s Server-Switch product line and Netvisor OS, eliminates external taps and the burden of a separate, dedicated monitoring fabric. The analytics are integrated in the user interfaces to show real time and historical data using time machine technology. Uses include network and fabric assurance, application performance monitoring, network security and compliance reporting.

Pluribus Networks was demonstrating inNetwork Analytics at the Open Networking Summit in Santa Clara, Booth 705, March 3-5, 2014.

The Pluribus Freedom Server-Switch brings directly into the network advanced fabric-wide monitoring and analytics services at a scale and performance unmatched by traditional network switches. By leveraging the Netvisor OS and Fusion-io, Inc.‘s drive technology, it can drive hundreds of thousands of IO/s to power the Freedom analytics engine with a performance and scale unmatched by traditional network switches and monitoring solutions in the industry.

Pluribus inNetwork Analytics provides visibility into real-time and historical application flow analytics, critical in today’s world of malware and attacks, and may be deployed seamlessly for bare metal and virtual server traffic flows without special agent running on the servers.

Leveraging the Freedom architecture, key features include:

• Out-of-box fabric-wide analytics without the requirement for dedicated tap ports on switches, flow collectors or agents on servers, and without the need for a dedicated monitoring fabric or additional code development. Flow collection is independent of switches or topology, and limitations due to switch hardware tables are all but eliminated.
• Analytics are not only fabric-wide, but also at the virtual network/application level, including visibility inside overlay traffic, no longer ‘opaque.’
• Ability in real-time to capture, analyze, modify, redirect, drop, and police flows across the entire fabric-cluster from any node in the cluster. Historical data is logged, available via ‘Time Machine,’ and may be exported for big data analysis.
• The Pluribus Freedom F64’s ‘industrial’ control plane permits monitoring at wire-rate as opposed to sampling, where nuances may be lost.
• APIs between the network and the application layer permit greater visibility into the analytics, and, applications may be proactive in managing network resources as opposed to being reactive as a result of these analytics.
• Pluribus offers export options to visualization and forensics applications, including open-source tools such as Qosient ARGUS, all of which may be hosted on Netvisor.

“Innovative solutions such as Pluribus inNetwork Analytics simplify compute, networking and virtualization in a unified platform,” said Will Hall, Fusion-io VP of OEM sales. “Fusion-io is proud to provide industry-leading acceleration and reliability with the ioScale for the Pluribus inNetwork Analytics solution.”

“The analytics tool that Pluribus is announcing today gives users detailed visibility into underlay and overlay networks without the need for a monitoring fabric, allowing them to monitor performance levels and scale in a way that could not be done with legacy solutions, ” said Peter Christy, 451 Research.

The Pluribus inNetwork Analytics solution, available this calendar quarter, consists of the Freedom F64 bundled with 825GB of Fusion-io ioScale storage and the Netvisor Software-Defined Fabric services package. The integrated storage is capable of maintaining a record of more than 1 million application flows across the fabric and can store more than 1TB of historical data per switch.