PDF's
Data Access Networks for Tools
A DAN is an out-of-band connection to TAP the network and take spanned ports's packet traffic and provide this information to tools. Today these TAP and span connections are connected to appliances that are aggregating, filtering, and regenerating the packet data streams to multiple tools. Gigamon's Tom Gallatin coined a concept called Data Access Networks for tools. The need to tap and span multiple segments to achieve an enterprise wide view and purchase the monitoring and recording tools created a situation where aggregation and filtering of these packet streams was needed. In 2003 Gigamon Systems was founded by veterans of network monitoring and telecommunications equipment companies, Gigamon Systems is the inventor and leading provider of Data-Access Switches. Its flagship product, GigaVUE, can multicast packets from one span or tap to many tools to solve the span port sharing problem.
GigaVUE also aggregates and can intelligently filter packets from many spans or taps to one or many tools. GigaVUE facilitates unobtrusive parallel tool deployment with network-wide coverage, significantly reducing customers’ capital budgets and yielding immediately ROI benefits.
OASYS can put together discrete components such as patch panels, wireless probes, TAPs and matrix switches with aggtegating, filtering and regeneration capabilities to accommodate your monitoring strategy. IMS or IP Multi-media Subsystem is a major initiative that is unifiying the broadband backbones. TAP connections that are aggregated, filtered and shared are needed to provide probes, such as RADCOM's R70, always-on access to all segments. These probes then pass the requested metrics to the centralized management Omni-Q server for enterprise wide managment.
Network Critical offers systems in varying sizes with a myriad of features that can be used alone or integrated into your environment.
OASYS has been focusing on TAPs and matix switches for monitoring the IT Infrastructure for over 15 years and can bring a wealth of experience and expertise to your project research including aggregation and/or filtering and load balancing.
Beyond the amazing developement of TAP and span aggregation and filtering we now offer new lower cost analyzer software coupled with high performance adapters with onboard sychronized packet time stamping for accurate measurements.
Accurate Time Stamping of Packets before the finicky system clock gets involved is possible using Endace DAG cards with GPS or CDMA antenna connections. Distributed analyzer and security monitoring can be sychronized nationally with accuracy in the 20 - 50 micro second range!
All new Endace high performance Gigabit and 10Gigabit analyzer cards come with a connection for a GPS antenna. The satellites are pulsing sentences with date time information. If you have GPS receivers in Walnut Creek California and in Bloomingdale New Jersey you can be sure within micro seconds that both are receiving the same signal. These new cards inject the time stamp on the packet and specialized software adds that time to the packet. With this capability and a distributed analysis system you can retrieve the same packet generated at one end from the remote end and subtract the remotely received packet's time stamp from the launched packet's time stamp. ONE WAY LATENCY. Why is this important? Consider financial stock feed data, voice over ip, ip multi-media system, 3GPP, broadcast video, and cellur data. These and more rely on one way performance and in many cases there is no "round trip" to derive latency. Knowing how long it takes to go one way and comparing this too many sites is necessary to prove a fair stock market. If your applications response needs to be profiled and the server is in good shape it is useful to know if the TX side or RX side is the problem. After all there is no guarantee that the full duplex connection is using the same path over your carrier's network.
Alternatively, if you can't afford or don't want to pay for roof rights to mount an antenna you could work with the same CDMA pulse that feeds cell phones. Cell towers are regenerating the satellite pulses albeit with less accuracy than directly. Your accuracy goes from the microsecond range to the millisecond range. This may be acceptable in instances where you are going great distances. Don't forget the signal is only traveling at 186,000miles per second. Einstein would have been proud that we can measure i sychronized microseconds over great distances. The old sniffer called Ethereal has evolved into Wireshark and the drivers are avialable for such cards. Cace Pilot is a new distributed network analyzer from CACE that provides a central console to a highly accurate distributed network monitoring system. OASYS can build to suit on IBM or HP servers, provide a Cace TurboBox, or an Endace Ninja Probe which can include addtional applications such as Snort and Splunk.
What are you waiting for?
These new solutions empower your current staff to complete multiple tasks with ease. Lower costs for all the elements (especially expensive probes and network analyzers) involved approach what you are paying now for maintenance alone for outdated monitoring systems. By aggregating multiple segments to one you could eliiminate 30-50% of your tool count. By filtiering you can bring new life into that older tool. Collaborate on our Blog with other IT professionals working on similar projects. Contact us and let us know what you think. There are new products that will save you money and streamline your IT Services. These new products already have a successful track record. Many are asking about what OASYS can do to help with conformance, mainly with Green requirements. Green is not just good for the planet but will save you a bundle as we will show you. We can offer onging compliance support services and solutions that will move you in the right direction.
