Network Monitoring, SDN, and Network Packet Brokers

By Michelle Amodio, TMCnet Contributor

The virtualization of networks and network services has made network monitoring and security a trickier business. Software defined networking (SDN), while a relatively new concept, is being lauded as a game changer when it comes to networking in general. With SDN, networks and services can be easily customized, operations are improved and performance is increased.

SDN separates the data from the equipment that controls it. It thus makes it easier to change the way in which that data is handled by making switches, routers and other devices software based.

Network packet brokers, meanwhile, already have a significant role to play in network monitoring because of how efficiently groom network traffic for performance and security data.

Unlike SDN, network packet brokers have a very clearly defined port of ingress and egress; this clarity helps in cloud environments to make sure that all data is processed, rather than just the data that an SDN application comes into contact with.  Network Packet Brokers also have the ability to discard irrelevant data depending upon where the data is meant to travel after egress; only voice data will go to VoIP phones, for example, thus decreasing network traffic that would otherwise be counter-productive. Moreover, network packet brokers possess the ability to "play well" with SSL encryption, in contrast to SDN.

Indeed, network packet brokers do a great job dealing with SSL data; many SDN solutions attempt to analyze the data but change it when they analyze it, resulting in data loss or corruption. The fact that SDN might not re-encrypt data after its inspection is a very real risk as well.  With network packet brokers, data is always guaranteed to be re-encrypted, thus contributing to network safety in general.

A network packet broker solution, moreover, allows for the forwarding of actionable packets, reducing the amount of extraneous traffic any given infrastructure solution might need for processing.

Thus, ultimately, one might describe network packet brokers as the SDN for networking monitoring.

To learn more about the relationship between network packet brokers and SDN, check out this article by F5 Networks (News - Alert).

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