By Patrick May, The Mercury News

The rest of the world may not have been perched on the edge of their seats, but a group of the geekiest geeks at networking powerhouse Cisco Systems could barely contain themselves Wednesday as they unveiled what they say is a game-changing way to monitor in real time what's going on inside a massive data center.



Members of the top-secret team are predicting this paradigm-shifting software will immensely improve the efficiency and power of big-business data management, impacting the daily lives of everyone using a credit card, checking in at their doctor's office, searching the Web or doing business at City Hall.



They call it Tetration Analytics, and for that we have English mathematician Reuben Louis Goodstein to blame. He came up with the term, which has been described as "the next hyperoperation after exponentiation, and is defined as iterated exponentiation.''



Dumbing it way down, once the product's installed by Cisco's gold-plated roster of Fortune 500 companies, it could revolutionize data-center operations, giving engineers a dramatic and instantaneous visibility into the previously mysterious realm of servers, racks and switches that hum softly in centers cooled at 60 degrees Fahrenheit. It also gives Cisco, a Silicon Valley icon that was once the most valuable company on the planet, new creds in software, a growth area that the networking pioneer wants to tap.



Cisco Chief Technical Officer Tom Edsall shepherded the software project, which was unveiled at a New York City news conference by his boss, CEO Chuck Robbins. Edsall likes to use the urban-landscape metaphor to explain what Tetration Analytics does.



"Imagine you're in a city at night with all the lights turned off," he says. "You're bumping into buildings and cars as you try and feel your way around, but you don't really know what's going on around you. And there's just so much information coming at you that you also don't know if there are bad guys sneaking in through back doors."



Now, he says, "we're going to turn on the lights."



The 18-month-long project has been a top-secret effort, full of Silicon Valley-style innovation and intrigue: a small team of some of the smartest computer whizzes on the planet; an outside-the-box dreamer and a Cisco Fellow named Navindra Yadav who worked nights and weekends to bring his idea to life; a shroud of mystery as the team worked in a private undercover laboratory while keeping friends and colleagues in the dark about what they were up to.



"For Tetration, we recruited the best engineering talent possible, drawing from the best engineering schools and people with really impressive résumés," Yadav said. "They are the best of the best. We're just a small team and we've been operating in stealth mode in a skunk works operation in Palo Alto."



Yadav said the campaign to come up with Cisco's new software, which essentially uses sensors to monitor up to 1 million unique bits of data per second and then analyze it in real time, was right out of the Valley playbook.



"You can produce an amazing amount of work with just a small tight team of very talented engineers. We're like a startup company within Cisco," the team's leader said.



Cisco is betting big on the product, which analyst Zeus Kerravala with ZK Research says will give customers "a new platform that will provide unparalleled visibility across their networks. It will let them gather and analyze data like never before, which will allow them to make better decisions with both applications and security."



Tetration, Kerravala said, represents an entirely new and more efficient way of running data centers, which are considered the "brains" of companies large and small. Whether it's a giant like Google mining its billions of user searches, a small health startup trying to ensure its data conforms to federal regulations or a financial company like American Express studying the buying behavior of customers around the globe, a data center that can be monitored deeply and instantaneously will be far more productive and much less prone to security breaches than anything before.



And as Kerravala pointed out, as esoteric as Tetration may sound, it could have real and measurable effects on all of us. "Data," he said, "affects our daily lives constantly and in a million ways that we don't even see. Tetration working in the background will provide a level of information about those activities that companies providing us services have never had before. For Cisco, this is another step in their evolution of trying to be more than just a network vendor."



©2016 the San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.