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Avi load balancer gets tighter with Cisco products
The Avi load balancer is more tightly integrated with Cisco ACI in the latest Avi Vantage Platform upgrade. Vantage 18.1 also sends more data to Cisco AppDynamics and Tetration.
Avi Networks, a maker of software to improve application performance and security, has introduced version 18.1 of its Vantage Platform, which provides better integration with several Cisco products.
The upgrade offers "enhanced integrations" with Cisco AppDynamics, Tetration and its software-defined networking architecture, called Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), according to Avi, based in Santa Clara, Calif. The ACI integration simplifies the process of placing application services, such as the Avi load balancer, on ACI networks.
Avi, which doesn't sell physical hardware, provides software companies can deploy on premises or in the cloud. The Vantage Platform offers elastic load balancing and web application security on a per-application basis. The company also makes an application delivery controller that provides Layer 4-7 services to containerized applications running in cloud environments. The Avi load balancer and other services compete with products from F5 and Citrix.
The latest version of Vantage Platform provides integration between the Avi Controller and Cisco's Application Policy Infrastructure Controller. Avi connects the controllers through REST APIs.
The Vantage upgrade also delivers telemetry from its Layer 4-7 services to the AppDynamics application performance management suite and the Tetration network analytics engine for the data center.
In June, Cisco Investments joined a $60 million round of funding for Avi, which brought its total funding to $115 million. Other investors included DAG Ventures, Greylock Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Menlo Ventures.
LiveAction intros LiveNX Server Appliance
LiveAction plans to release on Aug. 1 its LiveNX Server Appliance, a network performance monitor developed with the help of Savvius, a packet monitor maker LiveAction acquired in June.
The latest product provides LiveAction customers with a hardware option for deploying the company's technology. Previously, deployment options were limited to a public cloud or a virtualized server within a data center.
Savvius' "extensive hardware tuning experience" made it possible for LiveAction to deliver the LiveNX hardware quickly, the company said. LiveAction plans to release other acquisition-related products in the future.
Flow monitoring is a core feature in LiveNX, which taps into the NetFlow data-collection component built into routers and switches from Cisco and other manufacturers. The software uses the data to determine packet loss, delay and round-trip time, while also showing network administrators how well the network is delivering application services.
Analysts expect LiveAction, based in Palo Alto, Calif., to combine its network performance monitor with Savvius' packet monitor into a single product. Today, companies often buy those types of technologies separately, using a performance monitor for spotting problems and a packet monitor for performing in-depth analyses to pinpoint causes.
Corvil launches Intelligence Hub
Network analytics vendor Corvil plans to release this summer Intelligence Hub, a product designed to deliver intelligence to business operations, as well as network performance data to IT departments.
Intelligence Hub applies machine learning and predictive analytics to packet data to spot changes in business activity related to the total number of transactions, individual orders and products, Conversion rates and response times. The software sends change alerts to business teams.
For network operators, the software provides many of the features contained in Corvil's appliances, such as identifying and alerting on network anomalies, including packet loss, a dip in network performance or an increase in latency.
In general, Corvil products capture, timestamp and forward network packets to a separate capture appliance, where they are analyzed. Corvil can provide the hardware, or, in the case of Intelligence Hub, the software can run on a third-party device.
Corvil products can send customized streams of network data to big data sources, such as ElasticSearch, Hadoop, MongoDB and Splunk, so IT departments can draw more targeted information from the tools.
Corvil, headquartered in Dublin, competes with ExtraHop, ThousandEyes, Riverbed and NetScout.
