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Network Visibility The Key to WAN Optimization: Page 2 of 2

But there also “pure plays” that specialize in network visibility, Kerravala says. They include Net Scout, whose nGenius Enterprise Intelligence software does prediction, triage and diagnosis of network activity as well as the applications that run on it, Xangati, which bills its products as 'rapid problem identification' (RPI) appliances and Gigamon, whose appliances analyze packet flow. Kerravala says Gigamon’s 'visibility fabric' approach allows network administrators to get “very granular” with their network analyses.

Narus, with the “you can’t protect what you can’t see” approach, offers traffic scanning capability that identifies potential trouble, but also uses analytics to find trouble’s source.

"The amount of traffic flowing is growing … but the amount of visibility into that traffic is decreasing because every new application that someone writes or delivers doesn’t immediately have a signature," says Narus CEO Greg Oslan.

Given the variety of vendors in the WAN optimization market, it might be hard to choose the right one, be it for network visibility, security or application management. Kerravala says a vendor that provides all of them could be a better choice than trying to deploy different point solutions.

“When you put point solutions in front of each other ,you can wind up in a situation where one WAN optimization technique gets blocked by one of the other products,” he says.

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