Aiming to inject machine learning technologies into its networking platform, Plexxi announced this week that it is partnering with Decision Lab.
Mat Mathews, vice president of product management for Plexxi, says the fruits of that partnership will result in a new product that Plexxi will add to its portfolio that will embed machine learning algorithms into the networking software that gets deployed on a Plexxi switch in the data center.
The goal, says Mathews, is to create a dashboard that enables network administrators to make better informed decisions based on all the events occurring across the network. Today, notes Mathews, as IT environments become more complex, many decisions about network and security policies are being made based on a narrow set of data being collected.
“Today, network administrators are required to do a lot of work to get to the actual intelligence,” says Mathews.
Mathews says Decision Lab is an engineering firm that focuses on applying behavioral science technologies across a broad spectrum of use cases. The partnership with Decision Lab will enable Plexxi to counter similar machine learning initiatives that Cisco recently announced, says Mathews.
Mathews says it may still be a while before machine learning algorithms are routinely generated insights that can then be used to automate a wide range of responses and policies across a networking environment. It will still be up to a network administrator to decide just what policies should be implemented. But instead of making the policies using intuition based on a limited amount of data, those policies in the future will be based on all the available data.
