Cisco's Tetration Costs Far Less than $3M for Most Customers

In June 2016 Cisco unveiled its big Tetration Analytics platform to monitor everything in data centers. Analysts quickly added up the listed prices for the equipment and software, estimating a cost of $3 million for Tetration.

Today, Cisco announced a smaller-scale version of Tetration and provided updates on the costs of the platform.

Yogesh Kaushik, a Cisco senior director of product management, says the cost of the original large-scale hardware for most customers with a discount is $700,000 to $800,000. The software comes as a subscription model based on the number of workloads being monitored. At the low end of about 1,000 workloads, the cost is roughly $80,000 to $90,000 per year.

“We do realize the first release was built for large enterprises, because they were seeing the biggest challenges,” says Kaushik. “But smaller data centers also need this.”

Cisco is now offering a smaller platform, Tetration-M, that’s about one-fifth the size of the original, bringing down the hardware costs about one-third. Tetration-M is suitable for deployments up to 1,000 workloads. The software is based on the same pricing model as the larger appliance.

Cisco also clarified that the platform does not need to be paired with Cisco Nexus 9000 switches. In fact, Kaushik says all of Tetration’s customer so far are using the platform in legacy data centers that do not have the 9K switches.

In addition, Cisco also introduced Tetration Cloud with software deployed in the public cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is also suitable for deployments up to 1,000 workloads. This can cost as low as $15,000 to $20,000 per year.

Zero-Trust Security Model

Tetration is a homegrown product from Cisco with the goal to provide complete visibility to everything that happens in the data center. It does that via machine learning. And it provides security with a “zero-trust model.”

It “blocks everything by default and specifically opens punch holes as needed to deliver applications,” says Kaushik.

Often, business applications span hundreds of servers residing on a wide array of heterogeneous infrastructure, both in the data center and in the cloud. This complexity is further compounded by virtualization technologies and constant application changes due to DevOps environments.

Tetration’s security policy is applied across each application, regardless of where the application resides: virtual, bare metal, physical servers, or in private or public clouds, across any vendor’s infrastructure. This ensures that the policy stays intact even as the workload moves.

A lot of Tetration’s work involves monitoring the ever-increasing east-west traffic within data centers. “For anybody who operates even a small data center, all of their monitoring is sitting on the perimeter,” Kaushik says. “Yet 70 to 80 percent of traffic is happening east-west in the data center.”