Why Gigamon? Instant Network Monitoring ROI

Gigamon™ is the market leader in data access technology for network monitoring and analysis. Gigamon allows the customer to:

• Monitor critical data from high speed ports with lower speed tools.
• Interface with ANY tool for ANY data, at ANY time.
• Deploy tools much more intelligently and efficiently. Solve the contention for SPAN ports or TAPs when multiple tools are required.
• Eliminate engineering change order delays. Provide a very secure out-of-band “data socket” that allows flexibility in connecting and disconnecting tools in a production environment without waiting for maintenance windows..

Customer Status

Enterprise customer continues to add more 10G ports. In addition, evaluating new tools to be more vigilant in understanding discrete critical application transactions for compliance auditors.

Customer Problem

Tools need to connect to several 10G and 1G ports. Customer wants to consolidate tools and protect the investments made. High speed connections create a need to filter unwanted information so that tools are not oversubscribed. Added to this dilemma the customer could not plug and unplug tools indiscriminately in a production environment due to security constraints. Customer needed to collect critical data at various points on the network and was presented with a proposal that included 224 probes totaling $1.8 million dollars.

Gigamon Solution

Gigamon deploys TAPs directly into several 10G ports and aggregates the traffic eliminating the need to connect very expensive tools on each connection in question. Furthermore, Gigamon filters the traffic on the ingress and egress ports which allows specific tools connected to the GigaVUE to analyze the data at speeds ranging from 10/100/1000 bps.

Over $1.4M Saved in Capitol Expenditures

Original Plan: Use lots of probes everywhere
• 224 probes at $8,000 is approximately $1.8M
• IT staff needed to correlate data from various points and maintain the latest version on each probe.

Plan B: Span port aggregation to reduce probes
• Intermittent packet drop would cause inaccuracy in reports used by compliance auditors.
• Customer needed to add SPAN ports and upgrade to 10G SPAN ports which would reach havoc with the switches performance.

Final Solution: GigaVUE's + TAPs + centralized tools = $359,000
• 22 Probe = $160,000
• 24 network TAPs = $10,000
• 3 GigaVUE units = $189,000

Original Plan = $1,792,000
Final Solution = $359,000
Total Savings = $1,433,000

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Features	Functions	Benefits
Any-to-Any	Connect any tool(s) to any link at anytime without affecting the production network	Improved monitoring efficiency, effectiveness and network uptime
Any-to-Many	Replicate traffic to support multiple tools with competing monitoring demands	Share SPAN ports and TAPs, customizing access for all tools all the time
Many-to-Any	Aggregate traffic from multiple access points including Ether-channel to create a "big pipe" or "end-to-end" view	Save money by consolidating expensive tools and reducing management time
Packet Filtering	Customize and map traffic flow to multiple tools and reduce traffic load on all tools	Optimize tool utilization and share loads across multiple tools

The figure below illustrates the concept of data flows between network and tool ports. Data arrives from different sources at the network ports on the left and is forwarded to different tools connected to tool ports on the right. Traffic arriving at a single network port can be replicated to multiple destination tool ports. Filters can be applied at network and tool ports. Filters applied at network ports are pre-filters before aggregation and filters applied to the tool ports are post-filters after aggregation.