I had the pleasure of meeting Don Pyle, CEO together with Terry Slattery, CTO and Founder of Netcordia, the Annapolis MD network analytics appliance company. I've met Terry before, so it was my first dialog with Don. The company had a lot to bring up since our discussions a few months ago.
They've formed an OEM relationship to integrate Splunk log search technology into the NetMRI offering. The goal of the relationship (discussed here) is to enhance the analytic capabilities of the NetMRI, which is a well-regarded analytical appliance (deployed in 165+ customers including Ford Motor, several large universities, Citizens Bank and the World Bank Credit Union) known for:
- Linking multiple events from multiple devices to the same, connected network performance problem
- Associating events with industry Best Practices for in/out of policy reporting
- Network health check reporting
Left to right: Terry Slattery (CTO), Peter Brockmann and Don Pyle (CEO) pose for photo.
Netcordia has set in motion an information processing and presentation capability, broadening the NetMRI's appeal in analytical and operational applications to more, perhaps less specialized people. Using a modular architecture several top of mind issues for different customer segments are addressable – Application Flow, Firewall Security, Quality of Service, Policy Compliance, Cisco or Avaya VoIP modules.
Each of these modules integrate reporting, analysis and expert systems into an operational diagnostic and now reporting framework for network engineers.
The Network Health Report feature can scan the network for performance anomalies and report on the network operational status on an interval say every six hours. With the new 2.2 release which will ship later in June the transition to real-time review of whether the corrected problem has actually had the correct effect on network performance will occur. This real-time confirmation will be strengthened in release 2.3 due in the fall of 2007.
Moving to enabling thresholds and triggers that drive towards remediation and creating the change in the network infrastructure is the next step after release 2.2 ships.
