Emulex and Dynatrace deliver NetPod

“NetPod is the result of more than a year of collaboration between Emulex and Dynatrace, motivated by demand from mutual enterprise and service provider clients,” explained John Van Siclen, general manager, Dynatrace. “NetPod uniquely understands application logic and user behaviour for the leading applications, databases and middleware. This integrated solution closes the gap between network and application teams, giving them a unified set of insights to manage their digital channels and infrastructure.”

NetPod is a solution designed for high-speed 10/40/100Gb Ethernet networks to provide complete visibility across multiple tiers, infrastructure components and web and non-web applications. It intelligently monitors and records real-time application transactions across the most complex application delivery infrastructures spanning all leading load balancers, firewalls, servers, WAN accelerators, and middleware.

“Today’s IT teams need end-to-end tools capable of doing more than assisting in monitoring and identifying performance issues,” said Ali Hedayati, senior vice president and general manager, Network Visibility Products, Emulex. “Whether the problem is isolated to the client, network, server or database, the underlying packet data provided by NetPod can be used to ensure that the technology team responsible is provided irrefutable evidence of the true source of the problem. The application context provided by NetPod also supports rapid extraction of the right packets at the right time, even when a transaction of interest occurred in the past. All of this simplifies the delivery of mission-critical, network-centric applications and increases the business value of these applications by ensuring their availability to end users.”

NetPod will be available in Q1 calendar 2015 from select Emulex and Dynatrace partners with the requisite expertise in AA-NPM and APM. Forsythe and WWT were chosen as launch partners in North America because of their expertise in AA-NPM and APM, and ability to support NetPod customers.

“NetPod delivers a solution for our customers’ most complex network and application performance issues,” said Kevin Keuning, vice president, systems solutions, Forsythe. “Network teams deploying complex, multi-tiered applications need people and tools capable of efficiently troubleshooting the root cause of network performance problems, and in turn, the information and processes necessary to facilitate communication and cooperation in reaching an effective solution.”
As shown by a recent Emulex survey of network and security operations professionals, IT teams struggle to identify the root cause of issues, with the primary difficulty being a lack of accurate and timely data to drive issue identification and resolution.

“Offering a solution that saves our customers time and money by providing the factual evidence needed to identify a problem’s possible sources and offering meaningful and supportable actions to either correct it or at least isolate its root cause to a specific component is extremely valuable,” said Scott Miller, director and data centre practice lead, WWT. “NetPod delivers the full breadth of visibility for fault domain isolation across multiple data centre tiers, infrastructure components, web and non-web applications.”

NetPod combines several critical technologies to simplify and automate application transaction analysis:
· Continuous assessment of user experience and business impact of performance and availability issues;
· Real-time packet capture (with no packet loss) and nanosecond-scale time stamping to ensure that all of the required data is available for analysis;
· Deep storage of captured packets, enabling “back-in-time” playback analysis when intermittent issues occur;
· A comprehensive set of application protocol decodes, combined with application logic and user context; and
· Seamless compatibility with Dynatrace APM technologies as well as third party products requiring access to packets for security, for deep transaction tracing at the code level, synthetic monitoring, or mobile device monitoring.