Cloudy With a Chance of Dropped Packets

The topic of network visibility is still hot due in part to increasing data bandwidth requirements and network processing speeds. For instance, in a recent survey by Enterprise Management Associates (Network Visibility Controllers – Best Practices for Mainstreaming Monitoring Fabrics), 67% of respondents have or will convert to 10GE for their data centers within a year, 52% have or plan to migrate to 40GE within the year, and 40% have or plan to migrate to 100GE within the year.

One of the negative results (and it’s a big one) of increasing data network bandwidth is that it creates a network monitoring tool overload for the IT department. Because of investment protection concerns, many businesses are still using monitoring and security tools that were built for 1GE. When these tools are used in higher speed networks, they quickly become overloaded and useless. Even if cost were not the problem, there is a lower availability of 40GE and 100GE tools in the marketplace. Altogether, this creates a very dismal forecast with limited visibility and a strong chance that your network will drop packets before they are accurately processed by your monitoring and security information and event management (SIEM) tools.

With technology needs increasing and tight budgets persisting, there are no signs of the situation letting up any time soon. VoIP, video, cloud, virtualization, BYOD, new wireless initiatives, and other key business applications are saturating critical network services. These new evolving network technologies are creating discontinuities within the data network. At the same time, users and business are becoming increasingly reliant on 99.999% data network uptime and cannot tolerate network problems for mission critical services.

This is where the Ixia Anue NTO network monitoring switch can really shine for businesses. The patented dynamic filtering capability in our monitoring switch can give companies exactly what they want (and need). The advanced filtering capability means that the NTO can accept 10GE, 40GE, or even 100GE speeds, and throttle/filter the content so that your downstream monitoring and security tools don’t get overloaded (even if they are 1GE tools). All the data needed is sent to the right tools at the right time.

Thanks to Ixia for the article.