Cisco Proposes Plan to Monitor Data Centers
June 15 2016 - 4:11PM
Dow Jones News
By Don Clark
Cisco Systems Inc. says many companies don't know enough about
what is going on in their data centers, but it is has a plan to
change that.
The network-equipment giant, stepping up its focus on a hot
field called analytics, on Wednesday announced technology to
monitor data moving among corporate computers to see how
applications are working and more quickly fix technical glitches
and security holes.
Cisco's plans rely on putting sensors throughout corporate
computer rooms, in the form of software installed on server systems
and embedded in chips that power some of its networking gear. The
company said each sensor can track up to one million digital events
per second, quickly generating trove of information that other
Cisco software can help sift through and analyze.
Monitoring tools aren't a new concept. Companies such as Splunk
Inc. offer software to help track applications and data generated
by companies' hardware and software.
But Cisco argues that information gaps are growing, because of
factors such as data associated with mobile device and apps. and
the shift of some corporate computing jobs to external cloud
services.
"We've lost visibility into data centers at a very fundamental
level," said Chuck Robbins, Cisco's chief executive, in a blog post
published in connection with an event in New York to launch a new
product it calls Tetration Analytics.
Analysts add that most of existing tools track individual pieces
of hardware, or take samples of information flows rather than
tracking every packet of data. Because of Cisco's central position
in hardware plumbing, "the flow information they have gives you
granularity that no one has ever had before," said Zeus Kerravala,
an analyst at ZK Research.
Cisco's announcement underscores the company's determination to
benefit as companies spend more heavily on analytics, a market
Gartner Inc. puts at more than $15 billion. The company and
International Business Machines Corp., for example, this month
announced a deal to use IBM's Watson software to help analyze
information generated by Cisco equipment.
Cisco also is trying to reduce its reliance on selling hardware
like switches and routers, a field where demand has slowed and the
company has faced stiff competition and defections of talent. "They
are increasingly looking for software value propositions," said
Brad Casemore, an analyst at IDC.
Mr. Robbins wrote that Tetration Analytics creates a kind of
"time machine" that can be used to study operating patterns or
specific incidents to plan for the future and set better policies
for running their data centers.
Security is a key focus. One reason companies struggle in
stopping network attacks is the constant changes in where they
originate, which make it hard to keep a list of suspicious machines
or internet addresses to block.
Cisco said its new technology makes it easier; instead, to
enforce a "white list" of authorized systems, so that servers can
only accept connections from approved devices and no others.
Write to Don Clark at don.clark@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 15, 2016 15:56 ET (19:56 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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