TMCnet Network Packet Broker Week in Review

By Ed Silverstein, TMCnet Contributor

It was a busy week in the Network Packet Broker sector. Here are some of the major stories from TMCnet.

A story from TMCnet explained that a Network Packet Broker (NPB) is a hardware-based appliance that helps provide access and visibility for a variety of network monitoring. It acts as a passive visibility layer that lets network traffic pass through. It aggregates monitored traffic. It involves multiple links, traffic filtering, traffic regeneration, load balancing flagged traffic to various tools, pre-filtering traffic to offload, and directing traffic intelligently based on various port-mapping schemes. The NPB term was coined by Gartner analysts Deb Curtis and Jonah Kowall in April, 2012.

In another story, Engine Yard customers now have access to Boundary’s application and network monitoring solution, under a new partnership. Engine Yard PaaS customers can either opt for a free full-featured version of Boundary or buy the version that features higher levels of data retention and data volume capacity.

Also, TMCnet carried a story about the excitement generated about software-defined networking (SDN) among service providers and those involved in the network TAP sector. Still, they aren’t sure how they will use it, and there are not a lot of SDN products on the market. Infonetics recently released the results of a survey of service providers about SDN.

In addition, TMCnet’s Michelle Amodio wrote an article which said network monitoring is essential to keep systems stable and going around the clock without interruption. But she points out that network monitoring can be a flawed process if the right monitoring tools aren’t used. Network monitoring should be able to detect malicious software, running processes, and be able to check the state of any device and connection. Network monitoring should be done at the packet level, WildPackets recommends.

And estimates have shown that a 20 percent investment in a NPB can save 80 percent in the upper layer, resulting in a CAPEX of 80 percent and an OPEX (News - Alert) of 50 percent. Related to the news, VSS has introduced a new product can provide higher speeds, with 40G or 56 ports of 10G with network-wide mesh ability.

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