Products > Director™ > Multiply the Power of Your Monitoring Tools

The convergence of voice, data, and video, is driving organizations to depend more and more on multiple kinds of information flowing efficiently over high-speed networks. As data types proliferate, so do the types of monitoring tools needed to analyze the traffic and keep the network moving quickly and securely. The cost and complexity of your monitoring solution can explode as more kinds of tools need to be deployed across an ever-increasing number of critical links. Is there any help available for taming the developing monitoring beast?

Take control over your mission-critical, high-speed converged networks with Director, a new monitoring and data aggregation solution from Net Optics, the leader in monitoring access. Director connects dozens or hundreds of critical high-volume data links to a sub-station of monitoring tools, enabling you to send just the traffic of interest from any links to any tools you choose, with remote, dynamic control. Sophisticated filtering, aggregation, and regeneration capabilities enable not only one-to-one, many-to-one, and one-to-many mappings of links to tools, but even partial-to-one and partial-to-many by selecting partial traffic streams based on protocol, IP addresses, ports, and even packet payload content. Director is a tool that multiplies the efficiency of your monitoring resources—and monitoring tool investments—by providing the ability to share specialized tools across many links and to stretch the processing power of the tools by having them work only on traffic of interest for their particular purposes.

Increase IT Network Management Visibility

The need for Director rises from the growing speed, complexity, and intelligence of the modern network. Networks are the hidden wonders of the engineering world. Besides architects and administrators, few people realize how high a level of intelligence is automatically applied as networks find routes for packets, discover new network links and topologies, self-heal around downed or broken links, process dozens of different protocols, and do their best to keep the traffic secure and lawful. But administrators know they need to keep a close eye on how it all operates because problems do get beyond the network’s intelligence from time to time—especially with hackers and criminals doing their worst 24 x 7—and incidents can quickly grow to major problems if not discovered and remediated quickly.

One Method of providing monitoring access is often through Span ports built into network switches. An administrator simply reconfigures the switch to send copies of traffic of interest to a spare switch port for monitoring purposes. This technique potentially makes a single tool available to any of the links accessible by the switch. While Span ports still have a place in today’s monitoring access platform, their effectivity has shrunk considerably due to several factors:

• The need for administrator time, a maintenance window, and permission to reconfigure the network makes Span use burdensome and untimely
• The use of a port for Span means loss of revenue that could be generated on that port
• Span ports are not guaranteed to reflect 100 percent of the traffic of interest; they drop Span traffic when other demands on the switch grow too high, which is often true on today’s highly utilized switches; and Span ports simply can’t keep up with high-speed 1 Gigabit and 10 Gigabit traffic

For these reasons, Span port access has been largely replaced by use of test access ports or Taps that are installed in-line with the link that needs to be monitored. As dedicated devices, Taps are guaranteed to send the monitoring device 100 percent of all the traffic on the link—even Layer 1 and Layer 2 errors that Span ports would scrub out, and which are often important trouble-shooting clues. Moreover, Taps are totally secure and passive devices: they have no IP addresses and so are invisible to the link, and they do not affect the traffic flowing through the link, even if power is removed from the Tap. In fact, Taps for optical links do not consume any power at all, a significant benefit for the green data center.

Get The Access-Ready Solution

As it has grown to be the dominant access method for monitoring high-performance networks, Tap technology has evolved to incorporate a variety of valuable and innovative features. Each Director chassis brings together the best of all of these features in a single access-ready solution:

• Four 10-Gigabit XFP ports and 34 1-Gigabit ports with aggregating capability
• In-line and Span network modules
• SFP monitor port interface, supports regeneration and media conversion
• Low-latency, hardware-based Tapflow™ filtering

While Director packs a host of features and capabilities, it is a stand-alone appliance that is as easy to set up as any Tap. Just plug in the network links, the monitoring devices, and power, and use the simple point-and-click Net Optics Indigo™ management software to direct which traffic is copied to which tool. More sophisticated functionality is easily brought online using friendly graphical user interface (GUI) or efficient command line interface (CLI) tools. Online documentation with extensive examples is also provided. Customers report setting up and completing Director functional tests the same day they received the unit.

Aggregates

Regenerates

Switches

Filters

Load Balances

Summary

Accelerate data monitoring by letting Director send traffic of interest from all your critical links to a shared pool of devices. Leverage tools across multiple resources and groups with different monitoring needs.
Discover the value of TapFlow™ filtering to streamline network tuning and trouble-shooting, and stretch the value of your existing tools. Watch your monitoring access challenges shrink as your monitoring tool ROI grows. Director, the tool for monitoring high-speed converged networks, is available now.


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