A Menlo Park, Calif.-based startup says that it has developed a vendor-agnostic operating system that will detect data center problems.

Apstra OS provides network managers with data about network performance and configuration. Apstra CEO Mansour Karam says that the OS solves many bottlenecks that companies can experience because of network downtime.

The company, which was founded by veterans of networking firms Big Switch, Arista and Juniper, describes itself as a data center network automation firm. Karam is a veteran of Big Switch, CTO Sasha Ratkovic is a veteran of Juniper, and chief scientist David Cheriton is the former founder of Arista.

Karam says that Apstra was formed to help solve problems that often occur in data centers where gear from different vendors can cause glitches in configurations or errors. “You need to recognize that your network is a distributed system. This allows you to operate your network as a system,” Karam says.

Apstra OS is “intent driven,” which Karam says means that it will allow network managers to perform normal maintenance actions by providing simple intent-based specifications. Karam also says that the OS will scale to larger data centers.

Apstra OS can be leveraged across various applications including workflow management, resource management, device management, and streaming functions. The OS is interoperable with gears from many different vendors as well as Linux-based containerized environments.

Apstra has been testing its OS in field trials with customers since August 2015, and it will be generally available this summer.

Other companies have been working on data center automation. Last month Brocade debuted a network automation platform called Workflow Composer.

Photo: Apstra founders from left: CTO Sasha Ratkovic, CEO Mansour Karam and Chief Scientist David Cheriton.