TMCnet Network Packet Broker Week in Review

By Jamie Epstein, TMCnet Web Editor

Downtime or a network that is increasingly slowing down can spell out disaster for a business. Luckily, with a network packet broker in place though, the chances of those two things happening are made impossible due to the fact that this robust solution allows for a much higher level of visibility into each and every action taking place on the corporate infrastructure. This in turn enables network administrators to resolve small issues before they have the chance to become major problems.

This week in the rapidly expanding NPB space, Net Optics (News - Alert) Inc. unveiled revamped version 2.5 of its xFilter Network Packet Broker. Touted as powering high-density, high-throughput network tracking, the product should be able to assist customers attempting to transition to a virtual network, as well as overcome challenges related to a large amount of demanding applications taking up bandwidth.

In a statement, Ran Nahmias, senior director, Virtualization and Cloud Solutions, Net Optics said, "We're extremely excited that xFilter now gives customers a working solution for adopting important new protocols while maintaining seamless monitoring and access operations across the network. The xFilter is an ideal fit for customers in converged computing environments. This hardware and software solution is designed and enhanced to solve critical user needs for visibility, monitoring, and instrumentation-optimization."

The NPB also supports MPLS and PPPoE stripping, decapsulation of VXLAN, Cisco FabricPath, ER-SPAN and LTE (News - Alert)/GTP in addition to Layer 2 and Layer 3 filtering and policy-based forwarding.

In other news, at the recently concluded RSA Conference, VSS Monitoring, displayed an array of new NPB capabilities that give users access to key network security in-line appliances and monitoring systems. While its vBroker 200 and vBroker 300 NPB appliances bring an unparalleled level of flexibility and scalability to the hands of IT heads, they also encompass capabilities such as traffic filtering/grooming and offloading of packet processing to drive tool system efficiency. 

The vProtector Solution found within the vBroker Series helps a broad range of organizations to significantly enhance inline security applications and layered security architectures. In fact, the intuitive offering can prevent any network downtime from occurring even in the even of loss of power via its manual on-demand bypass function.

Closing out the week, the webinar titled “Cyber Barbarians at the Gate – Strategies for 21st Century Network Security Fortifications,” where Gordon Beith, director of Product Management, and Leena Merciline, senior product manager at VSS Monitoring (News - Alert), was highlighted for detailing current network security trends and why NPBs are necessary to protect organizations nowadays.

According to Peter Bernstein, TMCnet Senior Editor, “It is a dangerous world internally and externally, and simple anti-virus, anti-spam and firewalling is no longer sufficient for dealing with threats. What VSS Monitoring sees, and what NPBs are poised to help with, are five critical elements for better securing the enterprise assets. It should be noted that all of these were very hot subjects at RSA (News - Alert).”

These factors include: visibility, IT agility, defense-in-depth, scalability and service assurance.

There you have it, this week in network packet broker news. Be sure to stay tuned to the Network Packet Broker Community exclusively on TMCnet for all of the most up-to-date information from this growing vertical.

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