Enterasys Tracks Application Flow across Network

The Enterasys S-Series of routers and switches is part of an enterprise networking trend that is seeing more virtual machine and application management capabilities being embedded inside the core network. But while other providers of networking equipment have focused on adding enough intelligence to track virtual machines, Enterasys is taking this trend to its next logical step by also tracking and optimizing network performance based on what applications have the highest business priority.

According to Ray Suarez, director of product management, the S-Series can detect, register and authenticate applications regardless of what virtual machine they are running on at any given time on the network. That capability is crucial, he said, because a virtualization evolves, virtual machines and the applications that reside on them are going to dynamically move across enterprise networks.

As providers of virtual machine software have yet to come up with a way to effectively signal the network when a virtual machines moves, it's going to be up to the networks to provide the underlying technology to detect and tract virtual machines and the network services they have the rights to access.

Suarez said the Enterasys approach to this problem is fundamentally different because the devices on the network see each application as a "flow" on the network. When a particular application flow stops, the network not only detects that, but can also sense when the attributes of that application flow have begun to manifest themselves on another part of the network.