This week I had the pleasure of meeting Emulex who made a formal step into the security sector with the acquisition of Endace earlier this year.
A company with a 30 year history in sectors such as fibre channels and Ethernet, the acquisition allowed it to add network visualisation technology to its product offering. Meeting Shaun Walsh, senior vice president of corporate marketing and corporate development at Emulex, he said that the company’s mantra of “connect, monitor and manage” had enabled its customers when it came to handling more data.
He said: “Some time ago we asked ‘what if we became the company who drove network acceleration?’ and that is where we can add unique value, and where 90 per cent of our revenue comes from is OEMs who are trying to survive and we want to build things for those customers.”
In terms of the Endace acquisition, Walsh said that it looked at the networking world and realised that it was looking at a whole new world of networking, so the acquisition was done for three reasons: a new space for the company and where it has no plans to integrate the product into other lines; for a new sales channel; and to enable vision on attacks and detect what is going on.
On the last point, Walsh said: “This will help you see what changes need to be made in the system and monitor information and tell what is happening. There is so much computing power across devices, so it is about what works on it, so this is a set of resources.
“We are trying to enable Endace than integrate it; we call it a digital video recorder for the network and when there is an alert it will record and set off an alarm like a smoke detector. When an alert goes off, you can rewind ten minutes to capture what happened and you can go back 72 hours to cover a weekend to separate static from noise.”
Walsh claimed that security and development operations “agree that there needs to be a forensic level data analysis” and with a changing ecosystem and roadmap for Emulex, it is making sure it stays on the right path.
The Endace technology includes the “Probe” which is the video recorder for the network, and the visualisation product “Vision”, while recent launches included a connector for Splunk to analyse data between the Endace network recorders and Splunk’s third-party monitoring and security tools that detect anomalous network behaviour.
One of the issues for breach notification laws is knowing when something has occurred, and being able to forensically analyse it and deal with the issue. Emulex’s offering is interesting, especially with the capability to “rewind” by 72 hours, and should prove useful in detection and analysis.
