Cisco Unveils First-Ever Data Center Time Machine

In a recent press release, Cisco announced a new solution to help organizations gain complete visibility across everything in the data center in real-time. Cisco Tetration Analytics, which the company is calling a “time machine for the data center”, gains telemetry from hardware and software sensors, analyzing the information using advanced machine learning techniques. Tetration addresses critical data center operations such as compliance, application forensics, and the move to a whitelist security model. Cisco Tetration provides IT managers with a deep understanding of their data center trough continuous monitoring, analysis, and reporting.

The Cisco Tetration Analytics Platform offers customers the following:

• The ability to understand what applications are dependent on each other throughout their data center and into the cloud
• Move from reactive to proactive and make informed operational decisions and validate the effect of policy changes before they are deployed
• Search across billions of workflows in less than a second using Tetration’s forensics search engine and user interface
• Continuously monitor application behavior to quickly identify any deviation in communication platforms

Tetration is designed to enable greater visibility across the data center using either server software sensors network hardware sensors or both, combined for the most complete solution. The platform is a “one-touch” appliance, meaning that the servers and switches are pre-wired and the software is pre-installed. According to Cisco, the setup is also easy, and consists only of answering a series of questions regarding to the data center environment to allow the Cluster to be configured. No additional Big Data technical skills are needed to deploy the solution.

Brad Casemore, Research Director of Data Center Networks at the IDC, shares his two cents on Cisco’s latest release: “Real-time analytics – based on recent advances in unsupervised machine learning, behavior analysis, and visualization – facilitate the pervasive visibility required to gain insight into and control over application mobility, security, and data center-wide infrastructure. In announcing the Tetration Analytics Platform, Cisco is delivering on the rich promise of real-time analytics, with application-behavior insights, policy simulation and impact analysis, automated whitelist policy generation, long-term data retention for forensics and analysis, and the capacity to detect policy deviations within minutes.”

Cisco Tetration Analytics Platform will be available in July 2016, with the first iteration coming in the form of a full rack appliance that is deployed on-premise at the customer’s data center.

Click here to read Cisco’s full press release.