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Xangati Delivers First Products for Rapid Identification of Application and Network Performance Problems

Posted on: Monday, 18 June 2007, 09:02 CDT

Xangati today announced the first rapid problem identification (RPI) appliances, a product family whose precision profiling capability enables network operations -- in record time -- to accurately pinpoint the sources of application and network performance issues across the enterprise. Xangati's RPI products provide IT with unique views of the application behavior of each and every endpoint, along with the application delivery infrastructure that ties endpoints together. Armed with this information, network operations personnel now can become the first responders to network problems -- before end users and applications are adversely affected.

Key features of Xangati RPI products:

Auto-discovery of all active IP endpoints and all applications across the LAN and WAN

Precision profiling of every endpoint, providing a normalized view of applications produced and used, application performance, typical interactions, and other factors

Real-time detection of any atypical endpoint or application behavior, correlated dynamically across symptoms and variables to identify problems at their source

Scalable to 100,000 distinct endpoints and applications in a single appliance

Non-intrusive, passive deployment requiring no agents or probes

"What makes Xangati different from traditional products is its comprehensive view of how all the endpoints -- desktops, servers, storage devices, VoIP phones, video cameras, PDAs -- are interacting with each other and with the multiplicity of applications running across our infrastructure," said Paul Roybal, CIO, Bernalillo County, New Mexico. "Almost right away, my team could see the sources of multiple complex application responsiveness issues, which included a sluggish email server, an intermittent DNS failure, and an endpoint hijacked for spamming. Already our problem identification cycles have shrunk by at least one-third, and trouble tickets are being closed 20 percent faster."

Rapid Problem Identification for Complex Network Environments

Today's large enterprise networks are dynamic environments with thousands of diverse and highly distributed IP endpoints creating and consuming a myriad of both sanctioned and unsanctioned applications. This complexity creates significant headaches for an IT organization. Yankee Group estimates that 90 percent of today's troubleshooting efforts are spent in identifying and locating the sources of problems, dwarfing the time it takes to actually resolve and close out trouble tickets. Most often the end user is the "first responder" when problems arise, typically with symptoms of sluggish application performance or worse. As a result, network operations personnel are often forced to operate in tactical, reactive mode -- rather than focusing on strategic issues -- even though the vast majority of core problems arise from mis-use of endpoints or applications, not from the network itself.

Xangati's RPI product family automatically discovers all endpoints and all applications across all enterprise locations, and then precisely profiles their normal interactions to create a fine-grained view of what "should be." By correlating real-time activity with normalized profile behavior on up to 100,000 endpoints and applications, Xangati RPI appliances can quickly isolate the source of aberrations and provide network operations personnel with actionable data for addressing the issues. With Xangati, problems that might have taken days or weeks to identify can now be sourced in minutes or hours.

"Every minute that is wasted by fingerpointing, fighting fires, or chasing disparate symptoms of endpoint and application performance problems has a direct, bottom-line impact on business productivity," said Alan Robin, Xangati president and CEO. "Xangati RPI appliances understand the behaviors of every application and every endpoint, so they can see problems other troubleshooting products cannot. Xangati gives network operations the concrete evidence they need to make the most effective responses to every performance problem and ensure the highest productivity for their user base."

Precision Profiling -- the Critical Xangati Difference

Precision profiling of every endpoint and every application provides the critical differentiation for Xangati RPI appliances. Xangati has multiple patents pending on its multidimensional profiling, detection, and correlation technologies.

Once deployed on an enterprise network, Xangati appliances use flow information (NetFlow, sFlow, cFlow) or packets available from existing enterprise switches and routers to automatically discover all the IP endpoints (known and unknown). As part of this discovery process the RPI appliance ties each endpoint to a specific location (topology) and evaluates all application usage across endpoints. In every deployment to date, Xangati customers have discovered 25-50 percent more endpoints than they even knew existed on their enterprise.

The Xangati appliance then builds a precision profile of each endpoint across a range of variables: bit rate (in and out), packet rate (in and out), burstiness, interactions, endpoint affinity, application affinity, location affinity, and time affinity. The level of granularity the Xangati appliance offers is four orders of magnitude greater (40 times) than that offered by competing solutions.

Armed with fine-grained profiles that give a view of "a day in the life of" endpoints and applications, Xangati appliances can easily identify whether their behavior is likely or unlikely, in excess or deficit. By correlating these symptoms across time, application, and location, the Xangati appliances have the evidence they need to identify the core problem. Network operations personnel are not chained to a monitoring screen; instead the Xangati appliance allows IT to focus on higher priorities and react only when alerted that an endpoint's real-time behavior diverges from its norm.

"The Xangati RPI model has dramatically improved our ability to either fix a problem quickly or inform the customer definitively that it is not a network issue," said Tom Dominico, information systems manager at Kerman Telephone. "The majority of calls we receive from our subscribers about so-called network performance issues are either related to a troubled PC or to 'self-inflicted' Internet activity issues. With Xangati, we can immediately isolate the source as a network- or a subscriber-side problem. It has made us a much more responsive customer support organization."

Comprehensive Approach Breaks Down IT Silos, Lowers Cost

The Xangati RPI is the first solution to provide a comprehensive view of endpoint and application behavior -- across network "silos." Traditional troubleshooting products typically look at specific IT categories, focusing, for example, on servers, SANs (storage), or particular applications. These siloed tools offer no way to understand how all elements interact with one another across the network. As a result, problem identification responsibilities often "ping pong" between IT departments for days or weeks while end users complain and suffer. Industry research indicates that, on average, six service desk calls are needed just to identify the owner of a typical network problem.

In addition, most traditional models require a costly combination of software agents and hardware components to be deployed in a distributed fashion. The Xangati solution requires no probes or agents and easily integrates into an existing network infrastructure. A centrally deployed Xangati appliance allows an organization to quickly identify core problems across the entire enterprise for 1/10 of the cost of traditional systems.

"Having run an IT organization for a very large enterprise, I know from experience that traditional 'bottoms-up' management models are incapable of identifying the myriad problems that exist on today's complex networks," said Zeus Kerravala, infrastructure research and consulting manager for Yankee Group. "Yet those out-dated models still dominate IT. A top-down model like Xangati's provides a much more effective approach for identifying performance problems because it starts with the endpoint experience and sees all endpoint interactions. In effect, it can follow the end-user's pain point directly to its source."

Pricing and Availability

The Xangati RPI product family includes three distinct models -- the X100, X500, and X1000 -- scaled by processor speed and memory to address the needs of any size organization. Target customers include enterprises, independent operators and rural telcos, government agencies, educational institutions, and health care organizations. The products are currently available at entry-level prices of $35,000, US list.

Multimedia Resources

Product data sheet: http://www.xangati.com/download/Xangati_Brochure.pdf

Product photos: http://www.xangati.com/images/Xangati-RPI-appliance1000px.jpg

Case studies: http://www.xangati.com/html/case_study.php

About Xangati

Xangati's rapid problem identification technology enables IT organizations to be the first to respond to application and network performance problems and ensure high productivity across the enterprise. The privately held company is headquartered in Cupertino, California. For more information, visit the company website at www.xangati.com.

Source: Business Wire

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