Network monitoring specialist Net Optics earlier this week debuted a product that can monitor both physical and virtual network traffic. As more enterprises move to combine physical and virtualized environments, so too do monitoring capabilities have to scale to meet those demands, according to the company.
Dubbed the Phantom Virtual Tap, Net Optics' software lets users have total visibility on the traffic between virtual machines and in virtual servers on hypervisor stacks, and provides monitoring of those hypervisor stacks, as well.
It's integrated with Net Optics' Director switches, but can be deployed stand-alone, too, and also integrates with VMware vMotion, which is used to move running virtual machines from one physical server to another. There's a lack of products on the market that can offer holistic monitoring of networks across both physical and virtual deployments, the company insists.
Phantom Virtual Tap pricing starts at $2,500, and the software is licensed per VMware ESX or ESXi server. The company officially announced Phantom at this week's RSA conference in San Francisco.
"VMware is a good opportunity for value-added services and partners can really benefit and help us scale," added Sharon Besser, vice president of technology at the company. "As we go after the lead partners of VMware on the virtualization side, the ones that we have met have been very receptive and are looking at expanding their offerings."
Based in Santa Clara, Calif., Net Optics has continued a steady growth pace in the past two years, and in 2010, gained more than 400 new customers -- a 54 percent increase over the previous year, according to the company. In early January, Net Optics announced it had surpassed one million ports sold for 2010.
