Cisco Tetration Analytics: Data Center Visibility on a Whole New Scale

Technology’s impact on business continues to deepen, as more and more companies embrace digital transformation. In fact, analysts predict that by 2018, over 65% of Global 2000 enterprises will place digital transformation at the center of their corporate strategy.

Data centers sit at the heart of every company’s operations, and form a key component in digital transformation. Data centers can be thought of as the “brain” of a company, where the most critical information and applications operate and run. Managing data center operations is an essential part of a company’s overall embrace of technology. But data centers are becoming increasingly complex.

Imagine yourself navigating in a foreign city with no GPS, no map, and no street signs — that’s the data center of today. We don’t know what’s happening inside our data centers: How applications are interacting, how they’re connected, or even how many there are. Due to application proliferation and mobility, virtualization, hybrid clouds, and the continuous development cycle required to compete, we’ve lost visibility into data centers at a very fundamental level.

As a result, implementing change in the data center as part of an overall digital transformation effort can be very difficult, making more companies prone to vulnerability.

Cisco has a strong history of delivering innovative data center technology to benefit our customers — from our early days with Catalyst switches to the Unified Computing System to most recently Application Centric Infrastructure — so if any company could solve the visibility challenge, we thought it should be us. We’re also very interested in the potential that analytics can bring to improve efficiencies and enhance customer experiences. We’ve delivered analytics solutions that help digital transformation across industries, including transportation, healthcare, retail and energy, to name just a few.

Many companies, from global giants to inspired startups, have tackled data center visibility with different tools, and they’ve managed to deliver bits and pieces of the solution, but nothing comprehensive, easy-to-use or scalable to the dimensions required by the modern data center.

Today I’m pleased to announce a new solution, Cisco Tetration Analytics, an open platform that provides data center visibility at a level that’s never been achieved before, and at a scale never possible before. Tetration Analytics collects data in real time using software and hardware sensors — gathering 1M events per second — stores up to a year’s worth of data, analyzes the data with advanced analytics in real time, and delivers information critical for data center operations by providing actionable insights in real time, through easy to understand visuals.

We’ve also built in what amounts to a “time machine for the data center” that gathers and stores historical data and simulates what might happen. With this “rewind” capability, our customers can review the past and replay events in real time, plan for the future, and even freeze time and examine exactly what happened at a specific second.

Early customer field trials and feedback have been extremely positive— we’ve clearly identified a technology gap that has been holding organizations back. Companies are eager to begin taking advantage of this new-found visibility into their up-till-now mysterious data centers, and creatively using that knowledge to build up new capabilities as they embrace digital transformation. Our partners also have huge opportunities with the platform to drive incredible business value.

The story is just beginning for the Tetration Analytics platform. We’re looking forward to having more conversations and implementations with our customers so we can build on these initial capabilities. We are excited to be able to provide meaningful solutions that solve our customers’ most pressing challenges, and Tetration Analytics delivers on that promise.