ExtraHop Networks

ExtraHop Provides Support for the New Citrix XenDesktop 7

Justin Baker — Wed, 22 May 2013 17:10:00 +0000

At Citrix Synergy™ 2013, ExtraHop Will Participate in a Geek Speak Live! Session on Monitoring Desktop Virtualization Environments with Wire Data and Machine Data

SEATTLE, WA AND LOS ANGELES, CA – May 22, 2013 – Today at Citrix Synergy™, ExtraHop Networks announced that its IT operational intelligence platform will support the new Citrix XenDesktop® 7, also announced today at Citrix Synergy. This new version is the next major release of the market-leading solution and is designed to help businesses mobilize their core Windows line-of-business apps. XenDesktop 7 introduces easy deployment, simple administration, time-saving automation, and a flexible new architecture that prepares IT to leverage private, public, and hybrid cloud resources.

The ExtraHop platform is verified as Citrix Ready® for XenDesktop®, XenApp®, and NetScaler. By conducting real-time analysis for communications over the wire, ExtraHop enables IT teams to not only monitor end-user experience, but also correlates frontend issues to performance in the backend environment, including network, authentication, middleware, database, and storage.

ExtraHop’s agentless platform is perfectly aligned with mobile and cloud-services capabilities in XenDesktop 7, particularly in the following areas:

Mobility – XenDesktop 7 features new Citrix HDX technologies for a mobile-native look and feel for Windows applications and desktops. ExtraHop supports enterprise mobile efforts by providing IT Operations teams with real-time performance metrics segmented by operating systems, device types, and users. Moreover, the ExtraHop platform works for all devices connected to the network. With ExtraHop, IT organizations can confidently move forward with mobile efforts such as BYOD without worrying about losing visibility into end-user experience.

Cloud-style simplicity – XenDesktop 7 offers cloud-style automation and scale, enabling enterprises to provision virtualized desktops and applications as easily as a cloud-computing provider, even to users using mobile consumer devices. These capabilities fit perfectly with ExtraHop’s agentless approach to monitoring, which auto-discovers and auto-classifies applications and devices and automatically adjusts to changes in the environment. With ExtraHop, IT teams never have to worry about configuring their monitoring solutions or installing and updating agents. In addition, ExtraHop’s subscription-based pricing enables enterprises to scale their monitoring needs as their virtual environment grows for as little as $0.75 per day, per machine.

ExtraHop is a member of the Citrix Ready program, and the ExtraHop IT operational intelligence platform is verified to enhance Citrix environments. Customers can be confident that the ExtraHop platform has successfully passed a series of tests established by Citrix and can be trusted to work effectively with XenDesktop.

Many thought-leading ExtraHop users pair ExtraHop’s wire-data analysis with logs and other machine data stored and indexed in a Big Data solution such as Splunk. This combination of wire-data and machine-data is especially advantageous for Citrix administrators and other IT Operations professionals who need a consolidated view into all of their monitoring data.

A discussion panel at Citrix Synergy™ 2013 on May 22, from 2:30 pm to 3:15 pm in Room 210B, will cover the above scenario. ExtraHop CEO Jesse Rothstein will join solution architects from Splunk and Citrix and moderator Brandon Shell for a Geek Speak Live! session, Data everywhere and still no visibility: How to consolidate your Citrix data for greater insights. These three industry experts will discuss how to best monitor, standardize, and derive operational intelligence from data in complex desktop virtualization environments, including XenDesktop 7.

“Citrix environments are extremely complex, and obtaining an adequate level of visibility can be challenging,” said Rothstein. “Although being able to gather data from an abundance of sources is great, it quickly becomes a problem if IT teams cannot correlate and perform analysis on that data. Our panel session will explain how data can be converted into a standardized, flexible format and combined in a Big Data solution for a holistic, end-to-end view of Citrix environments.”

Download the ExtraHop Discovery Edition to try ExtraHop, including the desktop virtualization analysis, free for 60 days, and learn more by visiting booth 409 at Citrix Synergy.

About ExtraHop Networks
ExtraHop provides the real-time operational intelligence required to make IT more agile and proactive. The world’s best-run IT organizations use ExtraHop to manage more than a half-million devices and monitor over a trillion transactions daily, including Adobe, Alaska Airlines, Concur, Expedia, and Microsoft. Winner of many innovation awards from Gartner, Interop, and others, the ExtraHop platform auto-discovers and auto-classifies all applications and systems out of the box, providing the correlated, real-time visibility essential for dynamic environments. The ExtraHop platform deploys without agents and delivers value in less than 15 minutes, making it the most cost-effective solution on the market. Follow us on Twitter @ExtraHop.

Citrix®, XenDesktop® and XenApp® are trademarks of Citrix Systems, Inc. and/or one or more of its subsidiaries, and may be registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Press Contacts
Justin Baker
ExtraHop Networks
206-453-2290
pr@extrahop.com

Monitoring the Performance of Citrix XenDesktop 7 with ExtraHop

Tyson Supasatit — Wed, 22 May 2013 01:07:43 +0000

Citrix officially launched XenDesktop 7 at Citrix Synergy 2013 this week in Los Angeles. We’re at the conference to demonstrate how the ExtraHop platform equips IT organizations with the correlated, cross-tier visibility that they need to manage ever-growing XenDesktop deployments. In addition to real-time end-user experience insights, ExtraHop enables Citrix administrators to see into the back-end infrastructure performance, which can affect login times, reconnects, and client latency. Using ExtraHop, Citrix teams can verify that XenDesktop is performing well and also see the real cause of poor application performance wherever it resides in the underlying environment.

The Citrix server-based computing community has been anticipating XenDesktop 7 since it was first announced one year ago. XenDesktop 7 will help IT organizations bring Windows desktops and applications into the era of mobility and cloud services.

Enhancements for mobile users – New HDX deep compression and redirection technologies will improve experiences for users with consumer devices that are connecting over mobile broadband networks. The redesigned Citrix StoreFront will also make it easier for users to seamlessly access desktops and applications.
Simpler administration – XenDesktop 7 will also incorporate the capabilities previously available within XenApp, enabling IT organizations to unify management and administration of hosted applications and desktops (XenApp) and personalized desktops (XenDesktop). A boon to sysadmins working with the latest Microsoft technology, XenDesktop 7 will also feature optimizations for Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012.

End-User Experience Tied to Back-End Infrastructure Performance

Citrix’s vision for XenDesktop 7 is to enable IT organizations to provision virtualized desktops and applications as easily as a cloud-computing provider, even for users with mobile consumer devices. It’s an exciting proposition and one that fits perfectly with ExtraHop’s vision of dynamic and comprehensive performance monitoring.

With ExtraHop’s powerful Citrix ICA analysis capabilities and our ability to correlate Citrix streams and channels with activity at all of the back-end tiers, Citrix administrators and IT Operations teams can tie specific front-end issues to back-end infrastructure performance, including network, authentication service, middleware, database, and storage. Best of all, ExtraHop gathers all of this information passively by analyzing the wire data passing over the network in real time—no agents or synthetic transactions required! Many of our thought-leading users are also pairing this real-time wire data with logs and other machine data that is stored and indexed in Big Data solutions such as Splunk.

The combination of wire data and machine data provides a flexible and comprehensive way to monitor your entire Citrix environment. One of our most enthusiastic users of this joint solution is John Smith, Citrix Technology Professional and a Citrix Architect at a leading healthcare managed-services provider. He compares the fit between ExtraHop and Splunk to peanut butter and chocolate. We’re not sure about being peanut butter, but you get the idea. Read John’s analysis of why ExtraHop works better than agent-based solutions when monitoring Citrix environments.

You can try this peanut-butter-chocolate combination for free by downloading the trial versions for both ExtraHop and Splunk, plus the Splunk App for ExtraHop. Get started by visiting our Discovery Edition download page; fill out the form and one of us will contact you to help you get set up.

Stop by booth #409 at Citrix Synergy to get an in-person demo of our solution. In addition, make sure to attend the Geek Speak Live! panel discussion moderated by Brandon Shell on Wednesday from 2:30 pm – 3:15 pm in Room 210B. In that session, ExtraHop CEO Jesse Rothstein will join solution architects from Splunk and Citrix to talk about monitoring desktop virtualization environments. The session title says it all: “Data everywhere and still no visibility: How to consolidate your Citrix data for greater insights.” If you’ll be at Citrix Synergy, it’s a session you don’t want to miss!

ExtraHop Wins Best of Interop 2013 for Cloud Computing and Virtualization

Justin Baker — Tue, 14 May 2013 16:44:38 +0000

ExtraHop is Only Vendor Named Finalist in Two Best of Interop Award Categories: Cloud Computing and Virtualization and Management and Monitoring

SEATTLE, WA – May 14, 2013 – ExtraHop Networks, the provider of real-time IT operational intelligence from wire data, today announced that its ExtraHop for AWS solution won the Cloud Computing and Virtualization category of the 2013 Best of Interop awards; other finalists included entries from Brocade and Riverbed. ExtraHop’s flagship EH8000 appliance was also named a finalist in the Management and Monitoring category, distinguishing ExtraHop as the only company to be nominated in two Best of Interop categories.

Moving application workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS) introduces yet another layer of abstraction that hinders visibility into the performance of business-critical applications. And while AWS provides basic availability and resource utilization metrics to customers, it still does not provide the critical insights needed to troubleshoot problems, answer important business questions, track security compliance, monitor end-user activity, or tune the infrastructure for performance and efficiency.

“ExtraHop for AWS does something that’s not been possible before—offers visibility into how all parts of a customer’s systems are performing in the cloud,” wrote Best of Interop judge and InformationWeek Editor at Large, Charlie Babcock. “Amazon has its own list of operational statistics that it feeds to customers, but it’s not enough to find out what users really need to know. … [ExtraHop] knows about the first DNS request from an interaction, the authentication clearance, database access, the middleware response and the last byte to be served out of storage. It can analyze the network traffic for transaction content, the events that are taking place as software modules talk to each other. With that analysis, an IT manager can get an answer to the question ‘What’s happening in the environment right now?’”

ExtraHop for AWS enables companies to finally gain visibility into public clouds, supplying IT with actionable operational intelligence across all environments. ExtraHop for AWS is the only solution that not only can correlate and monitor anything running in Amazon’s Elastic Compute 2 (EC2) environments, but also in the AWS Relational Database Server (RDS), AWS Simple Queuing Service (SQS), and even AWS Simple Storage Service (S3). The ability to see and correlate issues across physical and cloud environments to this depth yields enormous time and cost savings for enterprises and makes moving to cloud infrastructures a much less nerve-wracking task.

“The Best of Interop Awards showcase IT vendors pushing the boundaries of technology,” wrote Andrew Conry-Murray, editor of Network Computing. “Each category winner demonstrates a commitment to innovation and has a compelling offering deserving of recognition.”

“ExtraHop for AWS enables IT teams, for the first time, to unify insight into on-premises applications and infrastructure with equally deep visibility for workloads running in AWS,” said Jesse Rothstein, ExtraHop CEO. “This Best of Interop honor highlights the advantages of our technology, which is the only solution to mine wire data in real time to provide complete visibility into the performance of all applications, all the time, in real time.”

About ExtraHop Networks

ExtraHop provides the real-time operational intelligence required to make IT more agile and proactive. The world’s best-run IT organizations use ExtraHop to manage more than a half-million devices and monitor over a trillion transactions daily, including Adobe, Alaska Airlines, Concur, Expedia, and Microsoft. Winner of many innovation awards from Gartner, Interop, and others, the ExtraHop platform auto-discovers and auto-classifies all applications and systems out of the box, providing the correlated, real-time visibility essential for dynamic environments. The ExtraHop platform deploys without agents and delivers value in less than 15 minutes, making it the most cost-effective solution on the market. Follow us on Twitter @ExtraHop.

About Interop®
Interop® drives the adoption of technology, providing knowledge and insight to help IT and corporate decision-makers achieve business success. Part of UBM Tech’s family of global brands, Interop is the leading business technology event series. Through in-depth educational programs, workshops, real-world demonstrations and live technology implementations in its unique InteropNet program, Interop provides the forum for the most powerful innovations and solutions the industry has to offer. Interop Las Vegas is the flagship event held each spring, with Interop New York held each fall, with annual international events in Mumbai and Tokyo, all produced by UBM Tech and partners. For more information about these events visit www.interop.com.

Press Contacts
Justin Baker
ExtraHop Networks
206-453-2290
pr@extrahop.com

ExtraHop Wins Best of Interop 2013 in Las Vegas

Justin Baker — Wed, 08 May 2013 20:11:34 +0000

IT Operations teams are under the gun. They need to tackle a growing list of new internal and business projects while supporting all the existing applications that keep the business running. It’s no easy task, but ExtraHop is here to help. Our solution provides IT operational intelligence, helping IT answer the question, “What is happening in my environment right now?” We aim to solve problems that have historically required multiple, disparate tools, and deliver a superset of multiple IT management disciplines, including APM, NPM, IPM, RUM, and BTM.

Our products are delivering on this vision, enabling our customers to spend more time innovating and less time fighting fires. We’ve built the most advanced solution on the market to provide unprecedented visibility into infrastructure and applications. For instance, our new EH8000 appliance features 20Gbps throughput and can analyze more than 400,000 transactions per second from L2-L7, providing correlated, cross-tier visibility that you can’t get with point solutions. And our ExtraHop for AWS solution “does something that’s not been possible before – offers visibility into how all parts of a customer’s systems are performing in the cloud, ”according to Cloud Computing and Virtualization Best of Interop judge Charles Babcock, Editor at Large, InformationWeek.

Thanks to new capabilities such as 20Gbps scalability in the EH8000 and advanced public cloud visibility in ExtraHop for AWS we’ve garnered some important industry recognition:

Last night, at Interop Las Vegas, ExtraHop won Best of Interop in the Cloud Computing and Virtualization category. The judging panel, which was comprised of 16 award-winning IT editors and analysts, chose ExtraHop for AWS as the category winner for its unparalleled ability to take the guesswork out of monitoring cross-tier public cloud deployments. Uniquely suited to dynamic cloud environments, ExtraHop for AWS auto-discovers and auto-classifies all applications and infrastructure that are communicating over the network without requiring agents, upfront configuration, or manual device tagging. By continuously analyzing all AWS traffic, ExtraHop equips IT teams with the real-time operational intelligence needed to answer the question, “What is happening in my environment right now?” In addition, our EH8000 appliance was named a finalist in the Monitoring and Management category.

Adding another couple feathers to our cap of awards, we were just named a Cool Vendor in Application Performance Monitoring by Gartner for our ability to provide a holistic view of performance across all tiers, including the network, web, database, VDI, and storage tiers. And we were also named an AlwaysOn OnDemand 100 Winner, a list that “represents a list of vigorous emerging and mature companies that are going beyond creating new business opportunities. The cloud infrastructure, SaaS, and on-demand marketplace is reinventing computing—how it’s powered, where data is stored, and where and when we access it.”

Of course, technical prowess and innovation mean nothing if they can’t be applied to solve real-world business problems. That’s why we’re excited that Jesse Rothstein, CEO of ExtraHop, and Sean Jacobsen, Director of IT Production Support for a leading online brokerage firm, will be discussing ExtraHop’s operational-intelligence solution during a joint presentation at Interop. The pair will explain how the online brokerage firm has used ExtraHop’s cross-tier visibility to improve application response times over 70 percent while transforming IT operations through a combination of people, process, and technology. Jacobsen is a 20-year IT operations veteran and will share how his team uses the ExtraHop platform to improve collaboration with application development, database, and network teams to proactively address performance and capacity issues.

If you’re attending Interop, we invite you to attend the session on Thursday May 9^th at 11:30 a.m. PT in Breakers D. Also, please be sure to stop by our booth (#2035) on the show floor where you can see Yo-Yo Joe knock a dime off someone’s ear (even yours?). The shows start every 30-minutes. We’ll also be serving the Best Beer of Interop (Fat Tire) starting at 4 p.m. this afternoon. Come by to enjoy an entertaining show and a great beer while learning more about our Best of Interop technology!

For more information on how the ExtraHop platform delivers IT operational intelligence not available with other products, visit the ExtraHop Solutions Page. Then request the free 60-day trial version to try it yourself.

Viva Las Vegas!

ExtraHop Named a Best of Interop 2013 Finalist for Two Awards: Best Cloud and Virtualization Product and Best Monitoring and Management Product

ExtraHop Networks — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 02:56:47 +0000

Joint Speaking Session at Interop with Leading Online Brokerage Firm Will Highlight ExtraHop in Action and the Power of Real-Time IT Operational Intelligence

SEATTLE, WA – April 30, 2013 – ExtraHop Networks, the leading provider of real-time IT operational intelligence, has been named a finalist in two Best of Interop categories. ExtraHop’s flagship EH8000 appliance, the industry’s first 20Gbps real-time analysis platform, has been named a finalist in the Management and Monitoring category while ExtraHop for Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been named a finalist in the Cloud Computing and Virtualization category. ExtraHop is the only finalist in two award categories. ExtraHop CEO Jesse Rothstein will also deliver a joint presentation at Interop with a leading online brokerage firm to demonstrate how the ExtraHop platform is transforming their IT operations through cross-tier visibility of all applications and infrastructure.

The EH8000 is the first all-in-one performance management solution capable of real-time, L2–L7 transaction analysis at a sustained 20Gbps of throughput for both encrypted and unencrypted traffic. ExtraHop’s software architecture makes the EH8000 the undisputed price-performance leader in the IT operations management industry, enabling companies to extract application, infrastructure, and transaction details from massive volumes of wire data with a single appliance.

According to CDW’s 2013 State of the Cloud Report, performance concerns and lack of visibility rank as a top barrier to cloud adoption, second only to security. ExtraHop for AWS takes the guesswork out of monitoring cross-tier public cloud deployments. Uniquely suited to dynamic cloud environments, ExtraHop for AWS auto-discovers and auto-classifies all applications and infrastructure that are communicating over the network without requiring agents, upfront configuration, or manual device tagging. By continuously analyzing all AWS traffic, ExtraHop equips IT teams with the real-time operational intelligence needed to answer the question, “What is happening in my environment right now?”

“The Best of Interop Awards acknowledge innovative products and services in business technology,” wrote Andrew Conry-Murray, editor of Network Computing. “At Interop, attendees can see these products on the show floor and have the opportunity to interact first hand with the latest advancements. The selected finalists for 2013 have put forth the most compelling offerings, and we congratulate each of the Best of Interop finalists.”

Jesse Rothstein, CEO of ExtraHop, and Sean Jacobsen, Director of IT Production Support for a leading online brokerage firm, will be discussing ExtraHop’s operational-intelligence solution during a joint presentation at Interop. The pair will deliver a presentation about how the online brokerage firm has used ExtraHop’s cross-tier visibility to improve application response times over 70 percent while transforming IT operations through a combination of people, process, and technology. Jacobsen is a 20-year IT operations veteran, and together with ExtraHop’s Rothstein he will share how his team uses the ExtraHop platform to improve collaboration with application development, database, and network teams to proactively address performance and capacity issues.

“For online brokerages, application performance is directly tied to revenue and customer attrition,” said Jesse Rothstein, CEO of ExtraHop Networks. “ExtraHop’s operational intelligence helps IT organizations not only solve problems more quickly, but transform from a reactive to proactive mode of operations and continually get better at what they do. I’m excited to be able to share the success of one of our most forward-thinking customers at Interop.”

Those interested in learning more about the ExtraHop platform can visit the ExtraHop booth #2035 at Interop Las Vegas, May 7–9, 2013, or request a free 60-day trail version of the ExtraHop platform. You can also attend the joint speaking session, Case Study: Major Online Brokerage Combines People, Process and Technology to Improve End-User Experience, on Thursday, May 9^th from 11:30 to 12:30 in Breakers D.

About ExtraHop Networks

About Interop®

Interop® drives the adoption of technology, providing knowledge and insight to help IT and corporate decision-makers achieve business success. Part of UBM Tech’s family of global brands, Interop is the leading business technology event series. Through in-depth educational programs, workshops, real-world demonstrations and live technology implementations in its unique InteropNet program, Interop provides the forum for the most powerful innovations and solutions the industry has to offer. Interop Las Vegas is the flagship event held each spring, with Interop New York held each fall, with annual international events in Mumbai and Tokyo, all produced by UBM Tech and partners. For more information about these events visit www.interop.com.

Press Contacts

Justin Baker

ExtraHop Networks

206-453-2290

pr@extrahop.com

ExtraHop Named Cool Vendor in Application Performance Monitoring by Gartner

ExtraHop Networks — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 03:01:20 +0000

ExtraHop’s IT Operational Intelligence Platform Provides Correlated Visibility Across Tiers, Driving a 250 Percent Year-over-Year Increase in New Customer Sales in 2012

SEATTLE, WA — April 25, 2013 — ExtraHop Networks, the leading provider of real-time IT operational intelligence solutions, today announced that Gartner has included it as a Cool Vendor in the Cool Vendors in Application Performance Monitoring, 2013^[1]report, authored by Gartner Research Vice President Will Cappelli and Gartner Research Director Jonah Kowall. According to Gartner, the report analyzes “emerging APM offerings bought by multiple buyers, including IT operations, application support, development and line-of-business application owners. These offerings encompass an understanding of network performance, the Internet’s health and critical mobile application performance.”

ExtraHop’s IT operational intelligence is a superset of application performance management (APM), network performance management (NPM), infrastructure performance management (IPM), business transaction management (BTM), and real-user management (RUM). It provides correlated visibility across tiers without the use of agents or other invasive instrumentation, all from a single appliance.

With a real-time view of the performance of all applications and infrastructure, IT Operations teams have the ability to answer the question, “What is happening in my environment right now?” Previously, when a technology problem occurred, IT organizations didn’t know where to start to look for its source. ExtraHop solves this problem by providing a holistic view of performance across all tiers, including the network, web, database, VDI, and storage tiers. Users can start with a high-level view of performance and then quickly drill down to granular device- and transaction-level details to pinpoint the root cause of a problem.

“IT teams can’t manage what they can’t measure. We are committed to providing IT organizations with visibility for all applications, all the time, in real time—even in highly dynamic environments,” said Jesse Rothstein, CEO at ExtraHop Networks. “Our solution mines real-time wire data to auto-discover and auto-classify applications and servers. With this up-to-date view of application performance, IT Operations teams can move from a reactive state to one that is very proactive, helping to minimize downtime and free up resources to focus on innovation.”

To get started with ExtraHop, request a 60-day trial at http://www.extrahop.com/discovery.

About ExtraHop Networks

ExtraHop provides the real-time operational intelligence required to make IT more agile and proactive. The world’s best-run IT organizations use ExtraHop to manage more than a half-million devices and monitor over a trillion transactions daily, including Adobe, Alaska Airlines, Concur, Expedia, and Microsoft. Winner of many innovation awards from Interop and others, the ExtraHop platform auto-discovers and auto-classifies all applications and systems out of the box, providing the correlated, real-time visibility essential for dynamic environments. The ExtraHop platform deploys without agents and delivers value in less than 15 minutes, making it the most cost-effective solution on the market. Follow us on Twitter @ExtraHop.

Press Contacts

Justin Baker

ExtraHop Networks

206-453-2290

pr@extrahop.com

[1] Will Cappelli and Jonah Kowall, Cool Vendors in Application Performance Monitoring, 2013. Gartner, April 15, 2013.

Disclaimer:

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in our research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Under the Hood: How ExtraHop Delivers 20Gbps of Real-Time Transaction Analysis

Jesse Rothstein — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 05:34:40 +0000

This post is authored by ExtraHop CEO Jesse Rothstein.

When we talk to IT teams who are considering ExtraHop, there’s often a discussion about scalability. People are skeptical, and rightfully so. Many monitoring vendors sell the dream of real-time, off-the-wire transaction analysis. In reality, they only do so for a subset of traffic and for a relatively small number of concurrent flows, or they write the bulk of the data to huge disk arrays for post-hoc analysis.

We love to talk to people about scalability and performance because it matters. For real-time analysis, if you can’t keep up, you fall behind, and if you fall behind, you might never catch up again. Additionally, greater scalability of real-time monitoring offers IT teams visibility into very large environments in which they previously were flying blind, and it offers a more cost-effective approach with fewer appliances.

The EH8000: An All-in-One Operational Intelligence Platform

Our new EH8000 appliance performs real-time, L2-L7 transaction analysis for up to a sustained 20Gbps. Throughput is only part of the picture. A single EH8000 can analyze more than 400,000 transactions per second, extracting application-level health and performance metrics such as URIs associated with HTTP 500 errors, slow stored procedures in a database, or the location of corrupt files in network-attached storage. This level of performance is far beyond what other passive monitoring vendors even advertise let alone what they actually do. For example, our EH8000 performs over an order of magnitude faster than the recently announced TruView appliance from Visual Network Systems, which, according to their own materials, only analyzes one million transactions per minute, or less than 17,000 per second. The ExtraHop platform’s analysis of more than 400,000 transactions per second is a true market leader.

Even with our current lead, I believe that ExtraHop will continue to widen the scalability gap compared to other products on the market. This is a bold claim, so please allow me to explain why.

Reason #1 – ExtraHop was built from the ground up for multi-core processing.

The first reason for ExtraHop’s substantial performance lead—and the reason why I believe ExtraHop will continue to widen the gap—is that our platform was built from the ground up for multi-core processing. Network processing is embarrassingly parallel and can be easily split across multiple cores. Systems that are more parallelized see greater speedup with more cores, according to Amdahl’s Law. The chart below illustrates the effect of Amdahl’s Law, where a program that is 95% parallelized sees a maximum speedup that is five times the maximum speedup of a program that is only 75% parallelized.[1] While other analysis products will see some benefit from multi-core processing, the ExtraHop platform, which is unburdened by legacy architectures and built from the ground up for multi-core processing, will continue to see tremendous benefit.

Source: Wikipedia

Vendors who are working to convert their existing code to run faster on newer multi-core processors face an uphill battle. As a recent Dr. Dobbs report, the State of Parallel Programming 2012, states, “Refactoring existing code is particularly challenging, so the researchers recommend that parallelism be part of the design from the start.” The report goes on to detail the types of concurrency bugs that developers often struggle with when converting existing serial code to parallel code.

Even at ExtraHop, where our software is designed for multi-core processing, we still deal with issues such as lock contention, concurrent access, NUMA (non-uniform memory access) effects, and cache ping-ponging. These are sophisticated problems that can have disastrous consequences if handled poorly, especially in this type of high-performance appliance, and there are relatively few development tools that can help.

Reason #2 – ExtraHop’s Engineering team is committed to performance.

Writing high-performance code is a rarely practiced art. The majority of software developers work on front-end applications that have relatively forgiving timing constraints. ExtraHop does not have this luxury with real-time packet processing, so we are laser-focused on writing performance-sensitive code. We are constantly profiling our systems to seek out bottlenecks, especially in the packet path. If new code adds a few as 1,000 CPU cycles, we will notice. We also pay close attention to caching effects, both for dedicated per-core and shared on-die caches. This is not to say that other vendors’ engineering teams are not committed to performance, but simply that our focus on performance is one of the reasons why the ExtraHop platform performs real-time transaction analysis at a sustained 20Gbps.

As an aside, if you are a software engineer looking to solve kernel-level, systems-engineering problems and enjoy working with an outstanding team of developers, we’re hiring.

Reason #3 – ExtraHop uses OS bypass for the data plane.

ExtraHop uses a custom Linux distribution for activities on the control plane, such as running the administration UI and configuring the system. For the data plane, ExtraHop uses a proprietary networking microkernel that runs on the metal for the fastest possible performance. Optimizing packet scheduling, performing memory management, and talking directly to I/O devices all help to speed up our packet processing considerably.

In addition to packet processing, another challenge is recording the stream of health and performance metrics to persistent storage. When we were designing the ExtraHop platform, we considered many commercial and open-source databases. We ended up rejecting these options because they would have required continuous management and administrative tuning. Most importantly, these RDBMSes couldn’t handle the level of sustained reads and writes that the ExtraHop platform requires. We also tried pure file-based systems that didn’t scale and investigated less-structured datastores such as Berkeley DB and Tokyo Cabinet. We could have solved this problem by throwing money at it, such as by requiring our users to purchase an expensive SQL cluster, but we wanted to build an all-in-one appliance with a small footprint that required little care and feeding.

To keep our deployment simple and make real-time analysis available to users immediately, we built a proprietary, high-speed, real-time streaming datastore that is optimized for telemetry, or time-sequenced data. This datastore bypasses the operating system to directly read from and write to block devices and uses fast in-memory indexing so that data can be read as soon as it is written, similar to how Google uses Big Table for web indexing.

ExtraHop Platform Architecture

You Are Right to Care About Scalability and Performance

ExtraHop cares as much about performance as you do. It will affect how much value you get from the product, and it also impacts data fidelity. If a load balancer, switch, firewall, or other in-line device is overloaded and drops packets, the sender will simply retransmit them (assuming a reliable transport protocol such as TCP). That doesn’t happen for an out-of-line device that uses a SPAN or network tap. If the device is overloaded, packets will drop, and analysis will suffer.

When choosing a real-time transaction-analysis solution, be sure to question the vendor on scalability. Ask them when their solution was first developed and if it has been redesigned for multi-core chip architectures. If they claim a certain level of throughput, ask them if they can handle high packet rates as well—many monitoring products that do not scale in real-world environments only talk about one end of the performance curve. And, finally, be sure to contact us so we can show you the ExtraHop difference!

[1] It’s worthwhile to consider the necessity of parallelization. Since 2005, increases in clock speed have plateaued while transistor counts have continued to grow according to Moore’s Law (see the graph below). During the same period, CPUs have gone from one to two to four to six to eight to sixteen CPU cores, starting with the dual-core Itanium 2 in 2006. To see maximum benefits from new processors, software developers must understand how to parallelize their systems. As experts have noted, this limitation means that the free lunch is over for software developers in regard to benefiting from hardware improvements. As a recent Intel whitepaper put it, “The future of computing is parallel computing, and the future of programming is parallel programming.”

Source: The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software

New ExtraHop Appliance Delivers Industry-First 20Gbps Real-Time Transaction Analysis

ExtraHop Networks — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 05:30:16 +0000

Multicore Processing, Proprietary Architecture, and High-Speed Datastore Deliver 10 Times the Performance and Functionality at One-Tenth of the Cost Compared to the Competition

SEATTLE, WA — April 2, 2013 — ExtraHop Networks, the leading provider of real-time IT operational intelligence, today announced its new EH8000 flagship appliance, the first all-in-one solution capable of real-time, L2–L7 transaction analysis for a sustained 20Gbps of throughput, over 400,000 HTTP transactions per second, and bulk encryption at 20Gbps with 35,000 transactions per second for 2048-bit keys. ExtraHop’s proprietary architecture makes the EH8000 the undisputed price-performance leader in the IT operations management industry, enabling companies to extract application-level transaction details from massive volumes of network traffic with a single appliance.

Many products that claim real-time transaction analysis can only handle a limited number of concurrent flows while storing the bulk of the packets for offline analysis. These legacy monitoring solutions require multiple network probes, reporting and analysis servers, and terabytes of expensive external storage. As a result, they cannot scale to meet the demands of upcoming 40Gb and 100Gb networks without breaking the bank for customers and adding layers of complexity.

“When we founded ExtraHop, we had a vision for a scalable solution that was simple for organizations to deploy and maintain,” said Jesse Rothstein, CEO, ExtraHop Networks. “We were the first to achieve sustained 10Gbps real-time transaction analysis and now we have achieved another industry first by delivering sustained 20Gbps analysis with the EH8000. This level of performance in a single appliance, paired with our subscription-based pricing model, enables organizations to analyze 10 times the amount of traffic at one-tenth of the price of competing products while providing the best visibility across all tiers.”

With ExtraHop’s proprietary microkernel, the ExtraHop platform performs full-stream reassembly of all traffic at wire speed. This truly application-fluent analysis of transactions and their full payload makes it possible to extract application-level details in real time, such as the URI and the user associated with a particular HTTP error, a slow stored database procedure, the method used in a SQL query, or the name of a corrupt file in network-attached storage.

“As the volume and speed of datacenter traffic increases, IT teams have greater difficulty maintaining visibility into the application workloads traversing the network,” said Brad Casemore, Director of Research for Datacenter Networking at IDC. “ExtraHop is among those who have responded to the requirement for a scalable solution that can deliver application-level visibility amid a rising tide of potentially murky application traffic.”

The new EH8000’s analysis capabilities reinforce ExtraHop’s position as the most cost-effective IT operational intelligence solution in the industry. With pricing as low as $9 per server per month, the ExtraHop platform can cost up to 90 percent less than agent-based application performance management (APM), network performance management (NPM), or business transaction management (BTM) products. Additionally, the ExtraHop platform provides unmatched out-of-the-box functionality supporting a broad array of standard and proprietary protocols that cover the network, DNS, authentication and directory services, web, virtualization, middleware, database, and storage tiers.

For more information about the technical architecture that powers the EH8000, read the blog post: Under the Hood: Why ExtraHop Can Claim 20Gbps Real-Time Transaction Analysis. Download the ExtraHop Discovery Edition to try the ExtraHop platform free for 60 days.

About ExtraHop Networks

ExtraHop provides the real-time operational intelligence required to make IT more agile and proactive. The world’s best-run IT organizations use ExtraHop to manage more than a quarter-million devices and monitor over a trillion transactions daily, including Adobe, Alaska Airlines, Concur, Expedia, and Microsoft. Winner of many innovation awards from Gartner, Interop, and others, the ExtraHop platform auto-discovers and auto-classifies all applications and systems out of the box, providing the correlated, real-time visibility essential for dynamic environments. The ExtraHop platform deploys without agents and delivers value in less than 15 minutes, making it the most cost-effective solution on the market. Follow us on Twitter @ExtraHop.

Press Contacts
Justin Baker
ExtraHop Networks
206-453-2290
pr@extrahop.com

Real-Time Intelligence for Your Applications and Infrastructure

ExtraHop Networks — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 20:19:49 +0000

ExtraHop provides real-time operational intelligence for complex, dynamic environments. ExtraHop provides real-time operational intelligence for complex, dynamic environments.

ExtraHop provides real-time operational intelligence for complex, dynamic environments.ExtraHop provides real-time operational intelligence for complex, dynamic environments.

ExtraHop provides real-time operational intelligence for complex, dynamic environments.

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ExtraHop provides real-time operational intelligence for complex, dynamic environments.

ExtraHop provides real-time operational intelligence for complex, dynamic environments.ExtraHop provides real-time operational intelligence for complex, dynamic environments.

Auto Trader Uses ExtraHop Networks for Seamless Physical to Virtual (P2V) Migration

ExtraHop Networks — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 05:44:07 +0000

ExtraHop Enables Leading Publisher to Increase Virtualisation While Safeguarding Performance and Operations

UNITED KINGDOM, LONDON – 12 March 2013 – ExtraHop, a provider of IT operational intelligence solutions, today announces a deal with Trader Media Group, publisher and owner of Auto Trader, a leading motoring website and magazine in the United Kingdom that contributed more than £257 million in annual revenue for 2012. As Trader Media executes its strategy for virtualisation and migration to the cloud, the company will use the ExtraHop platform to provide real-time visibility into the entire application environment, including physical and virtual infrastructure, as well as performance baselines and proactive notifications of performance issues.

“At Trader Media we are fully committed to driving efficiencies into our infrastructure through virtualisation and the adoption of cloud-based services,” says David Hill, Network Manager at Trader Media. “One challenge with virtualisation is the lack of visibility as we migrate applications from a physical to virtual environment; however, the ExtraHop platform eradicates this problem, providing detailed performance information about the whole virtual environment.”

When comparing solutions, the ExtraHop platform’s proactive alerting capability, real-time visibility and ease of deployment were unmatched by any other application, infrastructure or network performance monitoring vendor. Trader Media especially appreciated the ExtraHop platform’s ability to provide insight into the real-time performance and tuning parameters of the company’s F5 Networks application delivery controllers (ADCs).

“We were able to deploy a passive ExtraHop appliance and view key virtualisation performance data in 15 minutes. The ongoing benefits we receive with ExtraHop are tremendous. As we continually improve our applications and grow our audience, these changes can create other stresses and strains on the infrastructure. ExtraHop allows us to detect and resolve potential problems before they impact customers,” says Hill.

Owen Cole, VP EMEA, ExtraHop Networks, comments: “In today’s virtualised environments, managing performance is becoming increasingly difficult. The diversity of architectures means that without a unified vision of network, web, VDI, database and storage performance, you are blind to the whole picture. If a solution doesn’t assess the performance of everything, it may as well not measure the performance of anything. We are delighted to be working with Trader Media to help them with their migration to the cloud and to play such a significant role in the everyday running of the business.”

The ExtraHop solution, which is being implemented throughout Trader Media Group, enables the company to monitor every tier of the application environment in a single view without impacting performance. Passively analysing a copy of network traffic, the ExtraHop platform uses no agents or probes and requires no instrumentation, allowing organisations to monitor the performance of every application in a non-intrusive manner.

About ExtraHop Networks

ExtraHop provides the real-time operational intelligence required to make IT more agile and proactive. The world’s best-run IT organizations use ExtraHop to manage more than a quarter-million devices and monitor over a trillion transactions daily, including Adobe, Alaska Airlines, Concur, Expedia, and Microsoft. Winner of many innovation awards from Gartner, Interop, and others, the ExtraHop platform auto-discovers and auto-classifies all applications and systems out of the box, providing the correlated, real-time visibility essential for dynamic environments. The ExtraHop platform deploys without agents and delivers value in less than 15 minutes, making it the most cost-effective solution on the market. Follow us on Twitter @ExtraHopUK. For more information, visit www.extrahop.com.

Press Contacts
Justin Baker
ExtraHop Networks
206-453-2290
pr@extrahop.com