Pluribus enriches virtual management system with central console, apps
The company announced VCFcenter, which it describes as a single pane of glass that will let customers comprehend business service flows and packets across their networks. VCFcenter is key because the company’s primary analytics application -- VCF-IA – will plug into the system as well as new reporting and deep packet analysis applications that combined offer a powerful management system for virtual environments the company says.
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VCF–IA is available as a virtual application on a server or an offering bundled with the Pluribus F64 collector appliance. The application uses APIs in the Pluribus Netvisor switch OS to extract the time-series metadata associated with every flow in progress throughout the entire fabric, and stores these in a data repository for future analysis. The VCF-IA includes a real-time analytics engine and drill-down navigation to allow any particular type of flow or individual event to be located and studied, Pluribus says. In the end it should help IT troubleshoot problems quicker and keep critical applications running smoothly.
VCFcenter and its applications will work most effectively with the company’s Netvisor OS, a distributed network operating system as well as its server/switches but will also gather most information from non-Pluribus equipment as well, said Sunay Tripathi, co-founder and CTO of Pluribus.
Tripathi noted that the VCFcenter will be getting automation features in the future that will let the system respond to certain situations without IT intervention. “Stay tuned on automation,” he said.
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The notion of analyzing data center information by using big data analytics to offer IT managers a deeper understanding of their data center resources is also the driving idea behind a number of competive systems from VMware, Gigamon and most recently Cisco’s Tetration Analytics which gathers information from hardware and software sensors and analyzes the information using big data analytics. Cisco’s system, like Pluribus’, promises to dramatically simplify operational reliability, application migrations to SDN and the cloud as well as security monitoring.
Pricing for VCFcenter starts at $25,000 for tracking 10 million flows.