New virtualized data source for nGenius Service Assurance Solution
extends Unified Service Delivery Management capabilities into private
clouds.
WESTFORD, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 7, 2009--
NetScout
Systems today announced the availability of the nGenius® Virtual
Agent software, extending critical unified service delivery visibility
into applications contained within a virtual computing environment. As a
virtualized implementation of the company’s widely deployed nGenius
Probe technology, the nGenius Virtual Agent seamlessly extends
high-performance packet-flow monitoring and analysis capabilities deeper
into the data center and private clouds — enabling the IT organization
to regain true end-to-end visibility of application traffic from within
virtual servers.
As IT organizations are increasingly leveraging application and server
virtualization technologies to improve efficiency, reduce costs and ease
the environmental impact of compute resources, they lose vital
visibility into the behavior and performance of the very applications
that have been virtualized. What was once a rack of dedicated servers
interconnected via network switches has now been consolidated into a
single virtual server hosting many different applications with a virtual
switch enabling communications between the virtual machines. While tools
exist for managing the virtual platform, IT organizations have remained
challenged to consistently manage, optimize and troubleshoot virtualized
applications relative to, and in context with, end-to-end service
delivery. IT staff needs a unified view into inter-application
transactions and performance as it relates to end-to-end service levels
and user experience that is consistent with how traditional application
deployments have been measured.
“The consolidation and virtualization of servers has a compelling
economic return and has driven the broad adoption of virtualization
technology,” said Peter Christy, founder and principal analyst of the
Internet Research Group. “The virtualization of simple applications is
remarkably straightforward, but the virtualization of the more complex,
business-critical applications has been much slower because of the need
to also virtualize the subsystems and tools used to monitor and assure
performance. NetScout’s investment in virtualizing their probe
technologies assures that the important business applications they
support are as visible and manageable in a virtualized data center as
they are prior to virtualization.”
Seamlessly integrated with the nGenius Service Assurance Solution, the
nGenius Virtual Agent complements nGenius hardware-based instrumentation
strategies by reestablishing real-time, always-on visibility into
virtual computing environments. The nGenius Virtual Agent installs as a
virtual appliance on a virtual machine, consuming minimal platform
resources. In the case of a VMware® environment, the Virtual Agent
connects to the hypervisor’s virtual switch to reveal visibility for all
application transactions within or across virtual servers. The Agent
software automatically discovers all applications and their
interdependencies within, and external to, the virtual server providing
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), intelligent anomaly detection and
comprehensive performance metrics.
Extending Always-on intelligent Deep Packet Capture
Consistent
with dedicated Probe technology, the Virtual Agent supports short-term
packet capture capabilities that can be initiated on-demand or in
response to a pre-defined trigger. For deployments that require
always-on intelligent Deep Packet Capture (iDPC) capabilities from
within the virtual environment, the nGenius Virtual Agent can also be
deployed in a continuous “TAP mode” that enables the mirroring of all
virtual server traffic to an external nGenius InfiniStream appliance.
This enables invaluable back-in-time forensic analysis of application
and inter/intra virtual machine traffic providing even more granular
historical insight into application behavior from within the virtual
server. The dual mode operation of the Virtual Agent provides unmatched
deployment versatility while enabling the IT organization to regain
valuable forensics analysis capabilities that can only be performed with
actual application packets.
“As we have deployed virtualization technology, we have struggled to
maintain our insight into the interactions of applications and their
impact on our users’ experiences,” said Steve Carson, data network
system lead, Valero Corporate Services Company. “Prior to implementing
server virtualization, an nGenius InfiniStream® appliance in the
datacenter helped us understand what was happening with our
applications. Once we virtualized the applications, we lost the
granularity we once had, greatly hindering our ability to proactively
manage and pinpoint the cause of application performance issues. With
the nGenius Virtual Agent we have reestablished the end-to-end view we
once had to now include the virtualized application transactions. This
has really simplified our application management capabilities and
allowed us to maintain the stringent service levels demanded by our
users.”
With rich application performance metadata from virtual servers, the
nGenius Service Assurance Solution analyzes and reports on virtualized
application transactions in the identical manner and context as for
non-virtualized server transactions. This provides the IT organization
with granular understanding of how application interdependencies may
impact overall application performance and the downstream effect on user
experience. In addition, IT staff benefits from a unified view of the
virtual application traffic over the end-to-end service delivery
environment that also includes voice, video, telepresence, and other
non-virtualized applications. This dramatically simplifies the
management of complex virtual application deployments and enables the IT
organization to more efficiently optimize service delivery, predict and
prevent performance issues and speed problem resolution in context with
the overall service delivery environment. Cross-organization
collaboration is also enhanced since the nGenius Service Assurance
Solution provides unified visibility that can be leveraged across the IT
organization including the network, application, server and data center
teams to achieve operational consistency.
Addressing Dynamic Resource Movement
Adding to the
performance management challenges associated with virtualization is the
advent of dynamic application movement across virtual environments. In a
virtualized deployment, applications can move from one virtual server to
another, increasing the network management team’s challenge of
anticipating and managing network traffic. Since virtual servers can be
located in different parts of the data center or around the world, an
application’s movement can cause significant and unexpected impact to
network operations — resulting in performance degradations and undesired
user impact. While the application or server team may know about the
application’s movement, the network staff can be caught by surprise from
moving application-bound traffic. With the Virtual Agent deployed, the
nGenius Service Assurance Solution will identify application movement
between servers from a network perspective. The Virtual Agent
automatically discovers new or moved applications within a virtual
server enabling network staff to instantaneously know which applications
have moved, enabling them to predict and address sudden changes in
network traffic patterns. This knowledge will also help IT staff to
correlate and better understand the performance of virtualized services
across multiple servers and network elements, validate the
implementation of moved services and aid in the optimization of
application use of compute and network resources.
“As enterprises continue to drive datacenter and server consolidation
initiatives and increasingly leverage virtualization technologies, all
the challenges associated with optimizing, protecting and
troubleshooting applications apply to virtualized networks, but with
exponentially more complexity and urgency,” said Steven Shalita, vice
president of marketing, NetScout Systems. “A service assurance platform
is only as good as its data sources. NetScout continues to drive
technology innovation and make significant investments in our
intelligent data sources to enable more visibility in more places. By
addressing the challenges at the heart of the data center we are
enhancing and simplifying the IT organizations’ ability to find and
resolve complex services delivery problems when and where they occur.
This enables an already over tasked IT staff to meet demanding
service-level expectations by optimizing delivery, protecting against
service degradations, and simplifying operations for complex service
delivery environments.”
Availability
The initial implementation of the nGenius
Virtual Agent software is available now for VMware ESX and VMware ESXi
environments and can be seamlessly inserted into existing nGenius
managed environments. The iDPC TAP functionality will be supported in Q4
2009 through a minor software update available at no cost. NetScout
distributes the Virtual Agent Software freely, but its deployment
consumes a license port within the nGenius Performance Manager platform
resulting in an effective cost of $1,000 per deployed agent. Please
contact NetScout or your NetScout authorized reseller for more
information.
About NetScout Systems
NetScout Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTCT) is the market leader in Unified
Service Delivery Management enabling comprehensive end-to-end network
and application assurance. For 25 years, NetScout has delivered
breakthrough packet-flow technology that provides trusted and
comprehensive real-time network and application performance intelligence
enabling unified assurance of the network, applications and users. These
solutions enable IT staff to predict, preempt and resolve network and
service delivery problems while facilitating the optimization and
capacity planning of the network infrastructure. NetScout nGenius® and
Sniffer® solutions are deployed at more than 20,000 of the world’s
largest enterprises, government agencies, and service providers, on over
740,000 network segments to assure the network, applications, and
service delivery to their users and customers. More information about
NetScout Systems is available at http://www.netscout.com.
NetScout, the NetScout Logo, nGenius, InfiniStream and Sniffer are
registered trademarks of NetScout Systems, Inc. VMware is a registered
trademark of VMware, Inc.
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Source: NetScout Systems, Inc.
NetScout Systems, Inc.
Christine Johansen, 978-614-4113
Manager,
Analyst and Public Relations
johansenc@netscout.com
or
Davies
Murphy Group, Inc.
Rob Morton, 781-418-2460
netscout@daviesmurphy.com