As more network equipment vendors take on 10 Gigabit Ethernet, ExtraHop Networks instrumented its network and application performance management technology to be able to monitor such large-scale 10G environments. 

The start-up this week introduced its Application Delivery Assurance system 2.0, which the vendor amped up with 10G support as well as other scalability-enhancing features. The company, founded in January 2007 by former F5 Networks architects, also upgraded the product to be able to discover and categorize more than 3,000 network devices and improve the storage capabilities to handle larger environments. This release has also been upgraded to analyze “tens of thousands of transactions simultaneously and in real time,” the vendor says.

The ExtraHop Storage Module in this version allows IT managers to record transaction performance metrics and capture detailed error messages, as well as point out slow or degraded file transfers to help measure storage capacity needs.

“Customers can use our appliance with the storage module to tune their current storage and for instance avoid buying a new array,” says Jesse Rothstein, ExtraHop CEO and co-founder.

The ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance system is software packaged as an appliance that connects to a span or network tap. It passively autodiscovers servers and devices connected to the network and inspects network traffic. The product is able to reassemble the path, or hops, an application takes across the distributed network. Such information helps when trying to determine where application performance started to degrade or failed outright. The product serves up performance, protocol and other data via a Web-based user interface, which allows network and applications teams to drill down by application, device, protocol or even errors to learn more about the problem.

And the ExtraHop LDAP Module, also new to this release, lets IT managers monitor local or upstream LDAP providers to identify SLA breaches and troubleshoot performance problems. Other new features in Version 2.0 include trend-based alerting that learn application and network performance trends and then alerts on them and a set of pre-defined alerts that can be applied automatically.

Available now, pricing for ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance system 2.0 starts at about $60,000 for a 1U appliance, which does not include 10G support.

Do you Tweet? Follow me on Twitter here. 

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.