Author Profile - Jesse Rothstein is the CEO and co-founder of ExtraHop Networks, where his technical vision and expertise in enterprise networking give ExtraHop a competitive edge in the industry. With a world-class team of engineers under his leadership, Jesse is responsible for the technical architecture of the innovative ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance platform. Jesse co-founded ExtraHop after a six-year tenure at F5 Networks where he was a Senior Software Architect and co-inventor of the TMOS platform. Jesse was the architect and project lead for the BIG-IP v9 development effort and the technical lead for frameworks, clustering, and performance. Prior to F5, Jesse worked in product development at Motive Communications and the Trilogy Development Group.
Editor's Note - Lovemytool Readers, please allow me introduce you Jesse Rothstein, co-founder and CEO of ExtraHop Networks. Today ExtraHop will publically unveil their new and revolutionary network solution!
Every once in a while, a new company with an innovative technology comes along that makes you say “Wow, this is the beginning of something big”. Well, that was just the feeling I had when the ExtraHop Team first explained to me their vision and demonstrated their interface.
If you talk to anybody who is in the day-to-day network trenches, who deals with network management, analysis and monitoring tools, they will all tell you that the Network Management problem is not solved, especially to meet today’s dynamic challenges.Today’s network management and analysis techniques mostly use SNMP, Netflow and Packet Sniffing to gather data and statistics for “Analysis”. These traditional approaches can supply one with lots of data, but little overall integrated Information – Information is something that presents actionable details and information is the best and easiest way to find an issue, develop a solution and validate your network and application performance.
The ExtraHop solution brings a very cool and innovative new and fully integrated approach to this arena, one that has the potential to shake up the world of network management, monitoring and analysis. In short this new solutions helps you find your issues, solve problems and really see how efficient your network and business application are running. They do this by integrating lots of data and statistics from various network and application protocols, plus lots of system intelligence and then provide you, the network manager, with actionable information.
The ExtraHop technology is a powerful fully integrated solution with an intuitive User Interface (UI), impressive scalability and ease of deployment. I have seldom been shown a pre-release product that was ready for release as a prime time analysis system and ready for real world problem solving.Get ready, for today there is a new dawn for the network management, analysis and monitoring market!
I wish the ExtraHop Team, Great Success with their lofty goal of forever changing the network solution market.
Be sure to check out their technology by clicking on their links above and I hope you will be as Wowed as I was.
I wish you all Less Stress and Great Success, Merry Christmas - Oldcommguy™
The Beginning of ExtraHop
Nearly two years ago, my friend Raja and I started ExtraHop Networks with the goal of solving some universal networking problems. We both had worked at F5 Networks where we led the BIG-IP v9 development effort. BIG-IP v9, which began as my side project, was a great market success with over $1 billion in product revenue in the first three years. Leaving F5 was not easy, but Raja and I love building new products, and like many entrepreneurs, I think we had something to prove.
The State of the Industry
After leaving F5, we met in coffee shops around Seattle as we began outlining our new product ideas. We both had seen struggling companies with a solution in search of a problem and we were determined to avoid that path. Meeting with prospective customers to gather requirements and solicit feedback was much easier that we had anticipated. People were generally happy to meet with us. We weren't selling anything and we would usually buy lunch. Somewhat to our surprise, three pain points were mentioned again and again:
- Troubleshooting
- Performance tuning
- Capacity planning
A hodge-podge of tools and technologies have been applied to these problems for decades, including packet sniffers, agents, synthetic transactions, SNMP, and NetFlow. In general, these tools provide either a high-level telescopic view or low-level microscopic view of the network.
The problems are getting harder, and network-management tools have not kept up. Applications are becoming more distributed; as a result, complexity is increasing and visibility is decreasing. Intelligent network devices are blurring the lines between the network and the application. The widespread adoption of technologies like server virtualization and network-attached storage are creating new management challenges.
The ExtraHop Solution
We've spent the past two years developing the ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance system to address these challenges and to alleviate the pain points of troubleshooting, performance tuning, and capacity planning. Recent gains in processor speed and storage capacity have enabled us to develop a solution that was dismissed as infeasible just a few years ago.
The ExtraHop appliance is easy to deploy, requiring no configuration beyond a management IP address. The system passively monitors traffic using a network tap or SPAN port and offers an unprecedented level of detail from L2–L7 at disruptive levels of performance. The ExtraHop system includes a number of core features that distinguish it from other products and help solve today’s complex network issues.
Core Features
- Auto-Discovery
All servers and network devices are passively discovered through traffic analysis. There are no agents to install and nothing to configure.
- High-Speed, Real-Time Packet Processing
Our networking microkernel performs full-stream reassembly, processing tens of thousands of transactions simultaneously and in real time. - Application-Level Visibility
While some products rely on L4 data to make assumptions about application response time, the ExtraHop system extends visibility to L7. It records application-specific metrics for a number of mission-critical protocols. These metrics include transaction-timing information, methods, status codes, and errors. The list of supported protocols is expanded on an ongoing basis according to customer requests. - Integrated View across Applications, Networks, and Databases
The ExtraHop system provides a single, integrated view of the components that comprise the application environment. Information can be shared with other teams through the web UI and detailed PDF reports. - Intelligent Alerts
Threshold-based alerts can be configured for any metric the ExtraHop system collects. Trend-based alerts automatically notify the user of anomalous conditions. Notifications can be configured to send email, source an SNMP trap, or add a visual indicator to the UI. - Web and Mobile User Interface
Collecting and displaying data is not the same as providing information. Unlike data, information is useful and actionable. The ExtraHop system provides detailed performance information through a rich web UI or mobile UI. We apply familiar UI paradigms to access and navigate large amounts of information.
Summary
We are excited about bringing this innovative product to the market. We at ExtraHop believe that our technology can help tune the network environment, solve problems more rapidly, and plan for future needs. On a personal note, I am proud of our team and of the product that we’ve built. Please check us out. We look forward to hearing from you.
Profiles of the ExtraHop Founders
Jesse Rothstein is the CEO and co-founder of ExtraHop Networks, where his technical vision and expertise in enterprise networking give ExtraHop a competitive edge in the industry. With a world-class team of engineers under his leadership, Jesse is responsible for the technical architecture of the innovative ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance platform.
Jesse co-founded ExtraHop after a six-year tenure at F5 Networks where he was a Senior Software Architect and co-inventor of the TMOS platform. Jesse was the architect and project lead for the BIG-IP v9 development effort and the technical lead for frameworks, clustering, and performance. Prior to F5, Jesse worked in product development at Motive Communications and the Trilogy Development Group.
Jesse specializes in designing and implementing high-performance networking products. Jesse graduated from Rice University with bachelor's degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.
Raja Mukerji is the co-founder of ExtraHop Networks, where he oversees network-protocol development within the ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance platform. Prior to ExtraHop, Raja worked at F5 Networks as a Senior Software Architect where he was one of the lead developers behind the BIG-IP v9 product and the co-inventor of the TMOS platform. Raja was also the major-accounts liaison for critical issues within Product Development. Prior to F5, Raja worked in the financial-services industry as a Technology Architect at Strong Capital Management.
Raja is a renowned expert in application delivery and network protocols. He was involved in the FreeBSD project and contributed several enhancements to its TCP stack. Raja holds a bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering from the Milwaukee School of Engineering.








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