Start-up upgrades application-mapping appliance

NLayers, an application discovery and mapping start-up, this week upgraded its flagship appliance to work on larger networks, process more data more quickly and integrate configuration data with network management systems from the likes of HP and IBM.

InSight 3.0, an appliance that passively monitors traffic when connected to a network near a core switch, sniffs packets, discovers application conversations and builds a topology model displaying application dependencies among servers, end users and network devices. The product can help customers understand how applications use infrastructure components such as databases and servers, and more quickly determine the source of a problem when performance issues arise, the company says.

New to this release is a configuration management database that can share data with other databases a customer might have. NLayers also enabled the appliance to connect to 100 switches and process more data by moving from an SQL database to an Oracle database, which the company says increases the speed at which the appliance can process data.

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NLayers, an application discovery and mapping start-up, this week upgraded its flagship appliance to work on larger networks, process more data more quickly and integrate configuration data with network management systems from the likes of HP and IBM.

InSight 3.0, an appliance that passively monitors traffic when connected to a network near a core switch, sniffs packets, discovers application conversations and builds a topology model displaying application dependencies among servers, end users and network devices. The product can help customers understand how applications use infrastructure components such as databases and servers, and more quickly determine the source of a problem when performance issues arise, the company says.

New to this release is a configuration management database that can share data with other databases a customer might have. NLayers also enabled the appliance to connect to 100 switches and process more data by moving from an SQL database to an Oracle database, which the company says increases the speed at which the appliance can process data.

NLayers also integrated InSight with HP OpenView Network Node Manager, IBM Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator/ and Managed Objects’ Formula software. The company says integration with centralized network management systems will help customers more quickly pinpoint the cause of performance problems in real-time. NLayers competes with software products from Collation and Relicore.

For The Museum of Modern Art in New York, nLayers gave it a quick way to test and baseline-application traffic on a brand-new network. When MoMA underwent a physical redesign, the IT department had the opportunity to overhaul the organization’s “mom and pop" network into an enterprise-class data center.

“When we moved into the new building last year, we were able to redesign the infrastructure from soup to nuts, from cabling to switches, and more," says MoMA CIO Steven Peltzman. Now with more than 700 managed nodes, 1,000 workstations and 150 servers, according to Anthony Mills, manager of network services, the IT group wanted to ensure its network design assumptions worked in practice.

Mills says an InSight snapshot of the MoMA network verified how traffic would traverse the network, helped the IT group establish performance baselines and even revealed a couple of applications residing on end-user workstations that needed to be removed.

“It shows us the traffic source and destination and we spotted some spyware on an end-user workstation," Mills says. The organization plans to implement InSight 3.0 in the coming months.

Peltzman and Mills say InSight 3.0 will help them determine the impact of a new application rollout or how a new server will affect the performance baselines they’ve established.

“We will be able to see and compare where we were and how it differs when we make changes," Mills says.

Pricing for InSight 3.0 starts at about $75,000 for 2,000 nodes and a three-year license.