Active Visibility solutions for high-volume traffic monitoring

Data centre networks are experiencing increasing levels of east/west traffic from virtualisation and distributed applications, which is driving higher traffic volumes from the leaf to the spine, spurring migration to 40Gb and 100Gb network connectivity. At the same time, data centre administrators are moving to monitoring “below the spine switch” to provide visibility for security, operations monitoring and performance monitoring, increasing the number of points from which data has to be acquired. These considerations are directly influencing the most appropriate design and architecture to deliver essential visibility to network traffic and ‘virtual-machine to virtual-machine’ communications.

“We’re seeing an increase in distributed mission-critical applications driving more east/west traffic below the spine of next gen data centres as well as an increase in the desire to gain a more pervasive view of network and VM-VM activity,” said Ananda Rajagopal, vice president of product line management at Gigamon. “Unlike repurposed Ethernet switches that can only offer narrow visibility with no traffic intelligence, our new Visibility Fabric capabilities address higher traffic volume, allowing the best combination of cost, scale, reach and intelligence to be simultaneously achieved by administrators seeking uniform and pervasive visibility across their physical and virtual infrastructure.”

The upcoming new enhancements to the Gigamon Visibility Fabric include:
· Clustering capabilities for the GigaVUE-TA1 Traffic Aggregation nodes, enabling multiple nodes at the edge to act as a single logical unit when combined with an intelligent GigaVUE-H Series node at the core, for seamless extension of visibility to the edge. This extends the premium functionality of the Fabric all the way to the low-cost edge device and allows the GigaVUE-TA1 to be managed in an identical manner to the intelligent H Series node. This market-first architectural approach to visibility avoids overloading the operational and security tools that need access to the traffic.
· The addition of the industry’s first 40Gb BiDi TAPs, offered in compact 1 RU and 3 RU enclosures, and 40Gb BiDi optics into the Gigamon portfolio. This solution is ideal for customers considering a cost-effective approach upgrade from 10Gb to 40Gb using BiDi.
· The industry’s first combination of multiple 100Gb and 10Gb ports on a single blade allowing a higher degree of network and tool port consolidation to be achieved. The new 2-port 100Gb + 8-port 10Gb combination blade will be available on the GigaVUE-HD4 and GigaVUE-HD8 platforms.
· Gigamon’s Fabric Manager, GigaVUE-FM, will offer fabric-wide reporting capabilities, summarised and customisable dashboards, enhanced reporting to visualise the most/least utilised network/tool ports and traffic maps across the Visibility Fabric, audit trail support for security compliance and the ability to export reports for offline review.
· The industry’s first intelligent traffic visibility solution to automatically discover the topology of a connected network running Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) or Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP). This unique capability allows automatic trace-back of network interfaces detected to be at fault by the Visibility Fabric and drastically cuts down mean time to resolution.

“These enhancements are a tremendous development in the monitoring fabric space. Extending visibility deeper into the data centre will provide great information on demand,” said Ted Turner, senior network engineer at Intuit Inc. "Extending the management fabric will increase the capabilities of all organisations across all levels of application, performance and security monitoring.”