DRIVING NETWORK VISIBILITY

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Updated : May 31, 2015 00:01  am,
By Editor

w1Network visibility is an increasing challenge in heterogeneous data centre infrastructures and companies like Gigamon are offering solutions that tackle this

Network traffic visibility is increasingly a critical need for organization, especially as they look to deploy next generation virtualized infrastructure, software define networks and cloud based capabilities. Gigamon is a leading vendor in the network monitoring solutions space with its Unified Visibility Fabric solutions that offer pervasive traffic visibility for organizations that need to cope with an increase in the number and complexity of network security threats, the deployment of distributed applications over virtualized infrastructure, and the potential ‘blind spots’ created by encapsulated and encrypted traffic.

Vijay Babber, Senior Systems Engineer, Enterprise – MEA says, “Network visibility will become a strategic need for all organizations as they start to implement more security and control. For any organisations implementing 10, 40 or 100Gb networks then it is essential to be able to maintain their security posture and to monitor their environment. For companies who are migrating to a virtualized environment then being able to monitor and secure the traffic in the virtual switch. More and more systems need to be able to see the traffic on a network to be able to operate and so the visibility fabric provides that feature but with enough control to make it more efficient.”

The primary solution from Gigamon is the visibility architecture that provides a platform to enable insight into network infrastructure blind spots. The GigaVUE Fabric Nodes, which are modular and extensible for a range of scale and performance requirements from 1Gb 1RU nodes to 2.4Tb chassis-based solutions form the foundation of the distributed fabric. In larger visibility infrastructures, these nodes are typically organized into an edge-core architecture. The core layer of visibility is characterized by scale and intelligence capabilities that are essential to operators as network traffic diversity, complexity and volume continues to increase. Typically, this function is provided by the GigaVUE H Series, which when combined with the GigaSMART traffic and flow processing provides the core of any visibility architecture.  The GigaVUE-OS can now be used on white box hardware as well which extends visibility across the datacenter.

Further, the company offers GigaSMART technology which incorporates high-performance compute engines to extend the intelligence and value of the Gigamon Visibility Fabric architecture by modifying, transforming, and correlating traffic from various sources to the tools you rely upon for management, monitoring, and security.

Vijay explains, “We offer a single set of software that operates on a range of platforms of different sizes and scale. However it is possible to buy Smart features for the platform which include SSL decryption, Netflow generation, de-duplication, etc.”

The Visibility Fabric encompasses visibility into virtualized infrastructures as these deployments rapidly grow in enterprises. The GigaVUE-VM forms the virtual edge of the visibility infrastructure and extends visibility within virtual networks and monitors traffic between virtual machines.

Vijay says, “While the initial implementation of a visibility fabric was purely physical it has become worrying for customers that so much traffic traverses the virtual network unseen. To this end we have developed a version of our fabric nodes that can work in a VMWare environment and collect traffic from the virtual switch in the same way as we do from the physical network. This means that the same level of security awareness can be applied to both worlds at the same time.”

Privacy of individual data could be a challenge for companies but Gigamon takes care of it by enabling masking of vital personal data like credit card information for instance.

“We have the capability to mask and restrict private data that needs to be recorded for legal purposes. For example when credit card information needs to be checked for fraud purposes details like the CVV number can be masked to preserve the integrity of the customer.”

Along with the transition to virtualized infrastructures, where the network topology keeps changing quite swiftly and need good network visibility tools for monitoring, the deployment of converged infrastructures is also a scenario wherein such tools hold great relevance.

Vijay elaborates, “Many monitoring and security solutions for the datacenter rely on being able to see all of the traffic on the network. This allows them to gain insight into the data in flight which then means that they can identify potential breaches and also monitor performance and individual points across the data centre infrastructure. What Gigamon provides is the solution to the problem of making sure that each device receives the traffic it needs. It is wasteful and expensive to send non voice traffic to a voice recorder and likewise a network performance monitoring device does not need to see s stream of voice data. So what we do is identify the appropriate traffic and then send that to the appropriate device. While at the same time de-duplicating the traffic and potentially generating Netflow, time stamping and many other tasks to optimise the security and monitoring tasks.”

For the last published results in Q3 2014, the company grew the revenue year on year by 52% to $39.3m. Recently, the vendor opened a new office in Dubai with a sales and marketing function consisting of 6 people as it sees rising demand in the region.

He says, “While we cannot identify individual customers this region has been one of our fastest growing areas globally which has prompted us to open a new office and hire a sales and technical team. We have seen a growth in both our enterprise and service provider business which we transact exclusively through a channel partners.”

According to Gigamon, the key sectors for it in this region reflect quite closely the early adopters in other regions these are mainly service providers, government and finance. This is driven in service providers by the need to monitor network performance and customer experience. In the finance and government markets, demand is being driven mostly by the adoption of multi-tiered security.

For the company, one of the priorities is driving both channel and customer awareness. That is an ongoing task as the vendor continues to engage constantly with the region’s market via its presence at some of the premier technology events.

Vijay says, “We are significantly investing in marketing activities in the region with our distributor and channel partners. We will be delivering a number of campaigns both for end users and partner recruitment. Our focus is very much towards working with a small number of highly competent highly motivated partners in every region we operate in. We will work with our distribution partners to deliver technical and sales training as well as value added services such support with marketing activities in order to generate leads and build awareness, opportunities to sponsor regional and industry events and assistance in closing deals.”