* Network Physics introduces products to manage appliances centrally
Network Physics this week will introduce an appliance and software to serve as the centerpieces of the company’s plans to scale its point products to enterprisewide rollouts.
Network Physics’ NP-Director will serve as the central management and administration console for distributed NP-2000 appliances, which will continue to work locally and send intelligent summary data to NP-Director, the company says.
The appliances will use a new software operating system dubbed NetSensory, which will enable them to react and respond to problems without direction from NP-Director. It will also enable NP-Director to tap into endpoint appliances to get a global view of a network.
NP-Director would be installed in a data center and NP-2000 appliances would be distributed to remote and branch offices or other data centers. NP-2000s would be used to troubleshoot local issues, and NP-Director would have a global view of the network based on summary data collected from the distributed appliances.
“It’s similar to a human nervous system. The NP-2000 would have the intelligence to respond to an event without taking a lot of time to check with NP-Director,” says Bob Quillin, vice president of marketing for Network Physics.
For example, if an event at the New York data center was causing a delay in traffic, the IT staff could locally handle the problem without escalating the issue up to the NP-Director and the staff manning the global distribution of appliances. Along that same vein, if three NP-2000 appliances are encountering the same problem, the NP-Director administrator could step in and resolve the problem, rather than three separate IT staffs working on the same issue.
“The NP-2000s would have intelligence locally, and the NP-Director could seamlessly connect and drill down into that knowledge to resolve issues,” Quillin says.
The product additions put Network Physics in competition with the likes of NetScout Systems and NetQoS, and the technology enhancements could benefit customers, experts say.
“Fundamentally, it’s a very important step for them because having an architecture that allows information to scale is very important,” says R. Lynn Nye, president and founder of APM Advisors. “Instead of just pushing data back and forth, they have included distributed intelligent collectors that can interface with a central point to provide a consolidated view.”
Available now, a typical NetSensory deployment could include two or three NP-2000 appliances and one NP-Director, and pricing could start around $150,000 to $250,000, depending on network configuration.
