Luminus Networks
Real-time Intelligence for High-performance Networks

Emerging trends like openness, automation, and independence from hardware are driving numerous innovative technical models in the Software Defined Networking (SDN) landscape. As a result, CAPEX for networks has dramatically reduced and physical network architecture is becoming simpler and more robust, and open software is providing key services—enabling companies to realize the promise of on-demand provisioning of network capacity. Notably though, assuring the health and performance of a network remains a critical problem, which increases in SDN. “CIOs face the problem of keeping their networks operating seamlessly at high performance, while the applications change constantly at ever-increasing speed and scale,” begins Kelly Wanser, CEO, Luminus Networks.

Tackling this challenge is San Francisco, CA based Luminus Networks, a provider of comprehensive real-time intelligence systems for the network that unify information from across devices, software elements, and traffic— to identify, correct, predict, and prevent problems. The company’s high-performance real-time intelligence systems cater to large-scale data center networks. “Our systems are designed to unify data from across the physical and virtual (software) elements of the network into a single, simple source of information that can be used by network operations teams in a way they are familiar with, or programmed to interface with existing systems or to create new services,” explains Kelly. “In unifying management and monitoring information in software, we are the 'gateway drug to SDN'.” The company empowers today’s network operations teams with an omniscient and omni-temporal view of the network—enabling them to safely plugin and adopts other SDN capabilities.

In addition, Luminus' distributed systems approach enables users to leverage new, efficient,and clever methods for monitoring the performance of a network. “We’re able to dynamically test the paths that traffic takes, and to capture samples of traffic in response to issues. Current approaches to this type of monitoring are less targeted and more hardware intensive,” says Kelly.

Luminus' systems are designed to detect and prevent the problems that cause high profile critical network outages, similar to the ones experienced this year by the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), United Airlines and the U.S. Postal Service. What is crucial is the ability to capture data across all parts of the network—at the right levels of granularity—to model relevant interrelationships and make information accessible in real-time. “Access to this data can help the system learn the causes and symptoms of issues and help remediate or prevent them,” reckons Kelly.

In unifying management and monitoring information in software, we are the ‘gateway drug to SDN’

Providing best-of-breed data network systems to the largest and most demanding enterprise networks, Luminus has adapted the approach of popular network operators like Google and Amazon to serve large enterprises. “Our technical-approach suits large, high performance networks that require scalability, speed, and granularity,” Kelly asserts. The company has high-caliber network engineers, experienced in both hardware and SDN, with software developers from cloud, software systems and hyper-scale gaming (where demands are intensive), who all have a shared passion for solving the network problem. "We are the first of what we think will be a generation of vendors to blend network engineers with software and distributed systems developers from outside of networking."

“Moving forward, our aim is to support the majority of large, high-performance data center networks with real-time intelligence for operations. We will soon open our APIs, and foresee an ecosystem of customer and partner applications that leverage Luminus' comprehensive, multi-vendor, dynamic data system to support unimagined capabilities for running networks,” Kelly concludes.