According to Gartner, "As organisations' business models become digital, their traditional IT architectures are not agile or flexible enough to support growth and elasticity. As a result, spending is driven toward cloud-based hardware and software offerings. This move to the cloud, in turn, necessitates the use of modern management tools, such as free and open-source software that are different than tools used to manage for only on-premises IT infrastructure." (SDx: Build and Market Software-Defined Data Center Offerings Primer for 2016, January 28, 2016).
"Software-defined datacentres offer unprecedented business agility as well as rich management data with industry standard API's for analytics across all layers of the OSI stack," said Rob Smoot, Vice President, Product Marketing, Cloud Management Business Unit, VMware. "Together, VMware and ExtraHop are combining infrastructure- and application-level data sources within VMware vRealize Operations Manager for analytics at the application protocol and port layers. This data is correlated with the virtualised compute, network, and storage information for enhanced visibility, troubleshooting, compliance, and capacity management."
With ExtraHop, VMware users can now automate the integration of wire data analytics into the VMware vRealize management architecture to gain real-time insight across the VMware software-defined data centre, achieving the following benefits for enterprise IT:
- Dynamic On-Demand Visibility. The ExtraHop VMware vRealize Orchestrator Plugin makes it easy to automatically discover all VMware virtual machines and virtual switches as they are added to the environment, allowing users to classify and monitor these assets without any additional configuration.
- Intelligent Automation. ExtraHop alerts are used to trigger automated workflows within the VMware vRealize platform to improve agility and reduce management overhead.
- Centralised Management for Complete Insight. ExtraHop pulls rich wire data off of the network, and empowers customers to correlate insights with machine data, to deliver a complete view of virtualised environments and within a console VMware admins already use. This streamlined workflow gives visibility into the performance impact of SDDC orchestration in real time, and monitors application workloads as they migrate across the datacentre.
"SDDCs have the potential to unlock a new horizon of IT and business agility, but the realities of deployment and monitoring are not always straightforward and significantly limits the time to value," said John Leon, Vice President of Business Development at ExtraHop. "The extensive management capabilities of the vRealize suite, coupled with rich, real-time wire data from ExtraHop, rapidly provides customers with the global insights they need to take advantage of SDDC's promise and transform IT operations in the process."
