Features of a Data Access Network

Today's mission critical networks need higher performance, greater bandwidth, more reliability and security.

The complexity of today's networks where redundant links are everywhere, parallel links are combined into virtual channels, and load-balancers breaking up data streams such that packets are made to travel along different physical paths, make your business network nearly impossible to monitor efficiently and cost-effectively with traditional physical-layer taps and monitoring tools.

Moreover, your security, IT and compliance teams are competing for data access because they each need to deploy different monitoring tools to meet their assigned fiduciary mandates and each of their tools needs to acquire replica traffic specific to its needs from across the entire network in order to accurately reconstruct relevant transactions.

You need a better solution to share SPAN ports and support multiple tools, to aggregate traffic so that everyone gets a customized view. You need to distribute aggregated traffic among multiple tools working in parallel in order to provide comprehensive coverage. Most importantly, you need to save money by reducing the total number of tools deployed when monitoring modern enterprise networks.

Our GigaVUE® Data Access Switches are designed to help you build a scalable and on-demand Data Access Network (DAN) for distributed "out-of-band" network monitoring.

A Data Access Network is a "Data Socket" for monitoring tools; adds, changes and moves can be executed at anytime without physical changes to the production network. Aggregation and multicasting allow consolidation of expensive tools and sharing of SPAN ports and taps. Speed changes and media conversion are easily accommodated.

Network traffic can be "mapped" using multi-rule filters such that data aggregated from multiple switches or taps can be redistributed to multiple load-sharing monitoring tools, with each tool analyzing a specific VLAN range, port number or IP subnet, thereby performing comprehensive monitoring without oversubscribing any single tool.

Data Access Network (DAN) is a revolutionary concept whose time has come. It is the "intermediation" gateway between the network and the tools, allowing distributed connectivity and flexible load balancing between the monitoring requirement of the production network and resources available from the mission critical monitoring tools.


Features	Functions	Benefits
Any-to-Any	Deploy any tool to any link at anytime without affecting the production network	Improved monitoring efficiency, effectiveness and network uptime

Any-to-Many	Multicast 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 to create a "big pipe" or "end-to-end" view	Deploy fewer tools and consolidating valuable tools in a tool farm

Packet Filtering	Customize and map traffic flow to multiple tools and reduce traffic load on all tools	Optimize tool utilization and sharing load across multiple tools