CA Technologies and Ixia Decrease Complexity of Monitoring Cisco ACI, SD-WAN, Cloud

CA Technologies and Ixia deepened their existing partnership built on their monitoring and analytics capabilities to support Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), SD-WAN, and cloud environments including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. This builds on an existing agreement between the two companies that provides visibility across applications and workloads in traditional enterprise, cloud, or hybrid deployments. The new agreement will “resolve obfuscation, scale, and complexity hurdles (e.g. encapsulation, encryption, and lack of a traditional access to underlying network) introduced by newer dynamic architectures,” wrote Scott Westlake, Ixia director of business development  in an email. These newer architectures include Cisco ACI, SD-WAN, and public and private clouds. The joint offering enables a non-intrusive analysis of packet data across these “dynamic architectures.” What makes these environments — particularly Cisco ACI networks — so complex to monitor is that the technologies are often “difficult to scale, place high loads on production traffic, and can modify traffic, making it difficult to support the diverse monitoring needs of network, security, application, and server groups,” Westlake said. The new integration enables such analysis by combining CA’s network operation and analytics products and Ixia’s network visibility products to create a joint network performance management and diagnostics technology. It is delivered as software, and it is provisioned with a mix of virtual and physical appliances or cloud workloads. The automation component is enabled via APIs.