Derek Jackman, EMEA VP at Gigamon, discusses how intelligent Network Traffic Visibility solutions can help companies improve the performance, stability and efficiency of their infrastructure.  By understanding how to ‘bridge the gap’ between increasingly pervasive network infrastructure and the monitoring and security tools deployed on the network, owners of data centres can expect to realise dramatic improvements in infrastructure performance and stability. Network monitoring is critical. It provides forward looking insight into traffic and infrastructure growth and performance, in addition to delivering a platform for responsive and reactive maintenance and audit compliance.  With the high cost of monitoring and diagnostics tools, intelligent Network Traffic Visibility switches provide a cost effective, strategic solution, delivering maximum coverage with minimal investment.  With data centres continuing to expand and upgrade their networks in response to growth in both traffic and the applications generating the traffic, the ability to gain visibility into the data flows is in high demand.  Monitoring, recording and analysing user activity, application performance and security events are daunting tasks.  Ensuring visibility to the right data is imperative, and through the deployment of intelligent Network Traffic Visibility solutions, it is possible to provide secure access and complete visibility to all data, anywhere on the network, 24x7, without the need for configuration management or time demanding maintenance windows and change orders.

Gigamon believes that most data centres can improve infrastructure performance and reduce cost by simply rationalising the use of monitoring tools.  Generally, there are a number of tools spread across single or multiple data centres that are either under-utilised or are unable to see critical traffic flows and, as a result are limited in their ability to deliver full value.  By centralising these tools and deploying an out-of-band intelligent Traffic Visibility Network (TVN), data centres can realise notable cost reductions in conjunction with improvements in the performance of their tools.  The heart of the TVN is the aggregation switch that has the ability to filter the data and intelligently forward the traffic so that each tool on the network receives only the data that it needs, thereby dramatically reducing the amount of data forwarded resulting in improved performance of all tools as they capture, report or monitor data flows.

On average, Gigamon sees a 70% improvement in tool utilisation and effectiveness with customers who follow this strategy.  This quickly translates into cost savings due to an improved lifecycle for the tool as the reduced overhead on the tool CPU and I/O results in fewer tools being required to meet the demand.  One Gigamon customer running 9 data centres was incurring high costs due to the volume of traffic hitting its network probes but, by installing an intelligent Traffic Visibility Network switch to filter out irrelevant data, they reduced the volume of data by 75% which directly resulted in a similar reduction in operating costs.  By implementing the same strategy, another Gigamon customer in the finance sector reduced its costs by 60%.

Traffic Visibility Networking solutions work
Another beneficial attribute of intelligent Traffic Visibility Networking products is their ability to  seamlessly bridge the 1Gbps and 10Gbps divide.  A TVN switch can take 10Gbps traffic and intelligently distribute it out to 10Gbps and 1Gbps tools based on user-defined criteria.  Each 10Gbps tool receives the specific and appropriate traffic thereby reducing the chance of dropped packets due to over-subscription.  This feature also allows owners of data centres to utilise 1Gbps tools for longer – improving the return on capital investments.

Managing and monitoring traffic is essential in the modern physical and virtualised data centre. Through the deployment of intelligent Traffic Visibility Network solutions, data centre owners can ensure the scalability, reliability and robustness of their networks by delivering the right visibility, at the right time for the correct IP network performance monitoring tools. This creates an environment of lower operating costs, reduced capital consumption and higher return on past investments.

In summary:

• Reduce CapEx and OpEX investments by doing more with less.  Aggregate several high speed connections and send specific traffic to a consolidated and secure monitoring tool farm.
• Solve the contention for SPAN ports or TAPs when multiple tools share the same data.
• Reduce or eliminate engineering change order delays and maintenance windows.  Provide a secure, out-of-band ‘data path’ that delivers total flexibility in the connection and disconnection of tools in a production environment.
• Connect ANY tool to ANY data at ANY time.  TAP into several network segments simultaneously and provide many network and security engineers their own secure ‘sand box’.