Jesse Rothstein

ExtraHop Networks today is announcing $5.1 million in funding from Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, former Opsware CEO Ben Horowitz and Seattle venture capital firm Madrona Venture Group.

Founded by former F5 Networks employees Raja Mukerji and Jesse Rothstein, ExtraHop's appliance allows corporations to more effectively analyze and resolve network problems. Rothstein, who co-founded the company after six years at F5, said the appliance is like "Google Earth for your network." 

In other words, it allows IT managers to gain a high-level view of insight into what's happening across the entire network or drill down into specific issues, Rothstein said.

"Our system is really a solution for performance tuning, troubleshooting and capacity planning," he said. "The product can also proactively bring up problems to your attention before they turn into disasters."

That could be a database error that leads to slow response time or a misconfigured storage systems or a poorly functioning email exchange system 

The startup -- which competes against Austin, Texas-based NetQoS and  Westford, Mass.-based NetScout -- has about 20 systems either deployed or in various stages of testing. The ExtraHop device costs $59,000, with ecommerce, travel and transportation companies utilizing it. 

"It is really only through recent gains and processing power and storage capacity that a solution like ours had even become possible," said Rothstein.

ExtraHop has about 20 full time workers and contractors, with five open positions. The company could nearly double its staff this year, Rothstein said. 

ExtraHop raised a $1.5 million seed round in November 2007.