The magnitude of what we can do on any given mobile device has grown exponentially over the past few decades; our productivity is no longer dependent upon the ability to commute to work, but rather our connectivity to those we work with, network around, or hope to engage.
Accompanying this generational-flexibility of how we work comes with the demand for the IoT, and everything it connects to. So it should be no surprise that today’s service providers and data driven enterprises constantly vie for increased bandwidth as an evolutionary business driver to extend to their users.
When we look back to the 80’s and 90’s, most of us were just beginning to understand what the term ‘bandwidth’ was about as we clicked a small AOL or Earthlink icon button to dial up our 56 kbit/s connections. It was the network teams and IT Help Desk staff that were being charged with updates and connections—constantly being pressed with maintaining network uptime while exploring and identifying the best internet/bandwidth solutions available for their companies. Simultaneously, the large traditional phone conglomerates were keenly watching as Service Providers began meeting market demand as multimode fiber became the backbone for deployments beyond the capability of copper twisted pair, offering new services, new methods to communicate, and portability.
So, while in 1952, the UK-based physicist Narinder Singh Kapany invented the first actual fiber optical cable based on John Tyndall's experiments three decades earlier, its the consumer-landscape that has benefited from these advancements with current 5G bandwidth and 100G network speeds available.
We have consistently seen with each passing decade, products that address the increased demands for bandwidth via multi-mode fiber and optical fiber, but the most progressive advancement is with the release of the newest multi-mode fiber, OM5. Multi-mode fiber is a cost effective solution in high-speed environments, due to its high tolerance for fiber misalignment and low connection loss at each interface. OM5 fiber was designed to be fully compatible with OM3/OM4 fiber, so all legacy applications in existing infrastructures will be supported.
The transition from 2000 MHz*km with OM3, to 4700 MHZ*km with OM4, to the new standardized OM5 capabilities will now allow North America to deploy more services and technological advancements that haven’t been able to be delivered with 100G limitations, marking the anticipated balance of integrating artificial intelligence and machine learning into everyday practices.
To support the new OM5 multi-mode fiber, Garland Technology has released a new Network TAP, the first of its kind, and available only through Garland Technology, granting up to 400G network speeds. Learn how Garland Technology is helping drive innovation for the next century here.
Looking to add Network TAPs to your security deployment, but not sure where to start? Join us for a brief network Design-IT consultation or demo. No obligation - it’s what we love to do!
If the inline security tool goes off-line, the TAP will bypass the tool and automatically keep the link flowing. The Bypass TAP does this by sending heartbeat packets to the inline security tool. As long as the inline security tool is on-line, the heartbeat packets will be returned to the TAP, and the link traffic will continue to flow through the inline security tool.
If the heartbeat packets are not returned to the TAP (indicating that the inline security tool has gone off-line), the TAP will automatically 'bypass' the inline security tool and keep the link traffic flowing. The TAP also removes the heartbeat packets before sending the network traffic back onto the critical link.
While the TAP is in bypass mode, it continues to send heartbeat packets out to the inline security tool so that once the tool is back on-line, it will begin returning the heartbeat packets back to the TAP indicating that the tool is ready to go back to work. The TAP will then direct the network traffic back through the inline security tool along with the heartbeat packets placing the tool back inline.
Some of you may have noticed a flaw in the logic behind this solution! You say, “What if the TAP should fail because it is also in-line? Then the link will also fail!” The TAP would now be considered a point of failure. That is a good catch – but in our blog on Bypass vs. Failsafe, I explained that if a TAP were to fail or lose power, it must provide failsafe protection to the link it is attached to. So our network TAP will go into Failsafe mode keeping the link flowing.
Single point of failure: a risk to an IT network if one part of the system brings down a larger part of the entire system.
Heartbeat packet: a soft detection technology that monitors the health of inline appliances. Read the heartbeat packet blog here.
Critical link: the connection between two or more network devices or appliances that if the connection fails then the network is disrupted.