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Net Optics Director Pro Combines Deep Packet Inspection And Load Balancing: Page 2 of 2

Load balancing can be round robin where packets are sent to output ports in sequence. Round Robin might be used in cases where the analysis product receiving the packets has multiple interfaces and can rebuild the traffic flow across all the interfaces. For example, an analysis product might perform TCP off-load on the NICs to relieve that processing from the CPU. By sending packets in a round-robin fashion to the appliance can manage higher capacity.

Flow-based load-balancing is more intelligent and can forward all the packets in a network flow, loosely defined as all the packets between to network nodes, to an output port. Flow-based load-balancing is used in cases where there are different analysis engines attached to a network port. For example, if you have multiple IDSes analyzing traffic, each IDS needs to see all of the packets between two nodes that make up a flow to detect malicious traffic. Director Pro can load-balance flows between two nodes based on IP addresses, meaning all the packets between two nodes will be sent to the same output port. In addition, load-balancing can occur based on source IP address or destination IP addresses. Flow-based load-balancing allows the IDSes in our example to see the entire conversation between client and server while balancing conversations among multiple IDSes.
 
The intelligent tap market is getting interesting.  Director Pro adds some welcome features to network taps. The load balancing might give you more life out of existing analysis equipment without having to go through upgrades to keep up with network speeds and feeds. There are some features, like packet-slicing (removing a payload) and  data-masking (overwriting data), that intelligent taps, such as Gigamon's Gigavue 2404 offers, can aid in conforming to privacy policies while allowing analysis to be conducted. It looks like your options are expanding.