Cisco Proposes Plan to Monitor Data Centers

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 [e-mail]

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 15, 2016 15:56 ET (19:56 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.