Gigamon Introduces New Data Access Switch For High-Density Uses

Gigamon, a maker of appliances that analyze packet flow on data networks, has introduced a new data access switch that intelligently directs specific types of data to the appropriate data analysis tool. The GigaVUE-HD8 will be demonstrated at the Interop technology conference that begins May 8 in Las Vegas.

The GigaVUE-HD8 appliance replicates and filters network traffic to monitoring and security tools at speeds of 1G and10G. The appliance taps into the network at any number of access points and delivers data to either a web monitoring tool, a VoIP analyzer, an intrusion detection system or other such tools, says John Mattes, technical marketing engineer for Gigamon.

A feature of the Gigamon appliance, Mattes adds, is that it sends to each tool only the data it is designed to analyze. That's more efficient because the tool doesn't have to waste time looking at data that's not relevant to its purpose.

The GigaVUE-HD8 also employs Gigamon-patented technology called flow mapping. Mattes says flow mapping is superior to filtering technology used by competitors' appliances, in which individual ports have to be individually configured to do the routing. With flow mapping, IT professionals create a central traffic distribution policy designating that, for example, all web traffic goes to port 1, email traffic goes to port 2, database traffic goes to port 3, and so on.

"By doing that, the traffic distribution policy you create binds to the input port, and all the data will come into the map and the map will intelligently reroute that traffic to the tool. It gives administrators a lot more flexibility when they want to make changes on the fly," says Mattes.The "HD" in the product name stands for high density, and the "8" refers to the number of blades, or line cards, in the appliance. The appliance is a large, 14-rack system that can replace multiple 1U, 2U or 3U appliances that have to be wired together to provide the same capacity, he says. Merging multiple appliances into one unit saves space, energy and cooling costs, and reduces the number of transceivers needed to move data between disparate appliances.

Line cards can also be customized to have a number of different combinations of 1G or 10G ports, depending on network need. The GigaVUE-HD8 features a backplane capable of handling 1.024TB of data at once, a rate that is 25 times better than Gigamon's nearest competitor, says company spokesman Jim Berkman.

Such high-density appliances are in demand in the telecommunications space where wireless service providers are rolling out faster 4G and LTE networks, in financial services that demand high-availability, and low-latency networks or in government IT networks that need security from hacking and have to protect data under various privacy regulations, according to the company.

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