Tetration Open Platform Enables Strong Partner Ecosystem – Choice and Flexibility Benefits to Customers

It was just one year ago that Cisco announced 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, analyzes the data with advanced analytics, and delivers information critical for data center operations by providing actionable insights in real-time, through easy to understand visuals.

Earlier this year, we announced new software that automates policy enforcement, enabling organizations to build secure environments for their business. With the open APIs included in this release, customers and ecosystem partners got the ability to write their own applications that access data stored on the platform. Cisco continues its tradition of open ecosystems, around our open platforms, by working with companies to build applications and integrations with their solutions.

And over the past year, we have collaborated to build ecosystem momentum with a wide variety of technology partner solutions. The choice and flexibility to leverage a full-fledged open APIs, publish-subscribe Kafka messaging system, and ability to run data-processing apps on the Tetration platform, have enabled a strong 12 ecosystem partners to build a broad set of new use cases for our customers.

Today, we are proud to congratulate our ecosystem members for their collaborative efforts and share the results. The partners include AlgoSec, Avi, Citrix, Corvil, ExtraHop, F5, IBM QRadar, Infoblox, ServiceNow, Splunk, Tufin, and Turbonomic, our valued technology alliance partners.

The key use-cases we are tackling are below. Most of these partners are demonstrating these integrations in the World of Solutions at Cisco Live! US in Las Vegas between June 26th to June 29th – be sure to check them out, if you are participating.

Insight Exchange (Avi, Citrix, Corvil, ExtraHop, F5, Infoblox): Technologies from our partners have the ability to look deep into the packet and network metadata to identify various application-level information – clients accessing resources that are load-balanced, user authentication failures, ransomware, certificate and cipher audits, DHCP attributes of the endpoint, etc. The integration brings some of these key insights into the Tetration platform to enrich Tetration flows, by annotating relevant flows that correlate to these application patterns.

Service Visibility (ServiceNow): Information from Tetration analytics about end-points are now pushed to the CMDB. With this integration, the CMDB is enriched automatically and endpoint information in the CMDB is continually and automatically kept updated.

Service Assurance (Turbonomic): Deep insights on application communication patterns and network throughput & latency enables us to deliver analytics driven automated service assurance – to quickly recover from service degradation/outages or, better still, avoid service interruption by automating proactive VM/workload movement, right-sizing, placement, etc. With this integration, we are able to leverage Tetration insights to automate decisions on optimal workload placement in a virtualized environment.

Security Visibility and Orchestration (AlgoSec, Tufin): Security compliance platforms from our partners can now provide automated, continuous compliance assurance by tapping into the comprehensive corpus of inventory and flow information hosted on the Tetration Analytics platform. Security orchestration capabilities enable our customers to push security rules down to a variety of firewall devices, both on-prem and in the cloud. With this integration, customers will be able to enforce Tetration policies not just on the host agents and Cisco ACI infrastructure, but also on third-party firewalls.

This is just the beginning of our Tetration Ecosystem journey.  We would like to sincerely thank all these partners for collaborating with us to build integrated solutions to address key customer use-cases. We will continue to focus on deeper integrations with these partners to unlock more use cases as well as build integrations with new partners with the ultimate goal to make our joint customers as successful as possible.

Thank you to all of the executive support received from our partners:

AlgoSec: “We are excited to be a part of the Cisco Tetration Analytics eco-system”, said Anner Kushnir, VP of Technology at AlgoSec. “The synergy between Tetration’s powerful application discovery capabilities and AlgoSec’s business-driven security policy management and application connectivity mapping provides customers with unprecedented visibility into security risks and vulnerabilities in the context of business applications.”

Avi Networks: “Analytics and Big Data is a driving force in responsive, automated and secure IT, allowing customers to anticipate and proactively address business needs” said Edward Sharp, CSO at Avi Networks.  “By combining Cisco’s Tetration Analytics Platform with Avi’s application services fabric, including load balancing, analytics & insights, customers improve the value and security of their infrastructure, by detection and remediation of security policy outliers and anomalous traffic flows.”

Citrix: Ash Chowdappa, Vice President/General Manager, NetScaler ADC, Citrix

“Citrix and Cisco plan to strengthen our partnership with an emphasis on Analytics by integrating NetScaler ADCs and Management and Analytics Solution (MAS) with Cisco’s Tetration Analytics solution. The two-way exchange of network, application, infrastructure state information will help us deliver a complete L2 – L7 application stack visibility to simplify, optimize and secure application deployments. We look forward to continued integrated solution offerings  across our solution portfolio including NetScaler with hybrid cloud with Cisco CloudCenter, private cloud with Cisco ACI and Microsoft AzurePack, and micro-services deployments.”

Corvil: “It truly takes an ecosystem to address today’s complex challenges of data center visibility, service assurance, and security,” said David Murray, Chief Business Development Officer for Corvil.  “Our integration with Cisco Tetration Analytics gives customers new levels of insight and context to enable them to dynamically execute effective service and security policy changes to deliver improved and more secure digital experiences for their users and customers.  Through Corvil’s unique transaction insight we can further inform application and security policies around specific users, customers, and transactions.”

ExtraHop: “Through this integration with ExtraHop, Cisco customers can now realize the benefits of network traffic analysis for security,” said Raja Mukerji, CCO at ExtraHop. “By adding the real-time application layer visibility delivered by ExtraHop to Tetration’s behavioral analytics and machine learning, we offer the industry’s most targeted, accurate, rapid security policy enforcement, helping customers thwart major threats like ransomware.”

F5 Networks: “Cisco and F5 have worked together closely to help customers achieve application deployment agility in Cisco Nexus/ACI environments,” said Calvin Rowland, SVP Business Development and Public Cloud at F5. “I’m excited that we’re now extending our successful collaboration by taking advantage of the L4‐7 analytics in F5 BIG‐IP along with the security policy enforcement capabilities of Cisco Tetration Analytics. Today, we are demonstrating our joint integration that enables Tetration to do policy enforcement based on application-level insights gathered from F5 BIG-IP. Together, we will deliver comprehensive full‐stack network analytics, combined with application delivery and security solutions to micro‐segment and secure east‐west communications in the Data Center.”

Infoblox: “By combining Infoblox Actionable Network Intelligence with Tetration discovered Application insights and automatic policy enforcement capabilities, Infoblox can track the threat propagation and enforce polices across virtualized and bare-metal server environments, thereby reducing the datacenter surface that is vulnerable to attack and increasing operational efficiency through automation of routine tasks associated with datacenter security.” Prakash Nagpal, VP, Product Marketing, Infoblox.

Turbonomic: “Together, Turbonomic and Cisco Tetration deliver joint customers with a deeper understanding of data center resources through analytics for their IT environment, which is complemented with powerful enhancements to workload placement, IT optimization, and automation. The combination enables customers to power their hybrid cloud environment with network aware placement and dynamic workload optimization. We look forward to executing on our joint roadmap to extend the value of these systems even further.” – Endre Sara, Vice President, Advanced Engineering at Turbonomic.

Tufin: “Cisco Tetration Analytics and Tufin Orchestration Suite are a powerful duo,” said Reuven Harrison, CTO, Tufin. “The two solutions combined can have an immediate positive impact on our joint customers who are seeking to secure their applications in a modern IT environment with hybrid cloud platforms and micro-service architectures. Our joint customers are already benefitting from this partnership by gaining deep visibility and enforcing tight network segmentation for their dynamic applications.”

Related links:

Ranga Rao’s Blog for Tetration 2.0: https://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/robust-ecosystem-for-tetration-analytics

DC ecosystem webpage: www.cisco.com/go/dcecosystem

Tetration webpage: www.cisco.com/go/tetration