Network visibility is the base of all network activities, whether they be for security or monitoring purposes. After all, if you don’t have visibility, you lack an understanding of what’s going on in the network.
Cirries Technologies came to Garland Technology because they were looking for a reliable and affordable method of network access for their packet capture software solutions being implemented in an enterprise environment.
Prepaid Wireless Group is one of the largest mobile virtual network aggregators (MVNA) in North America. They needed to improve network visibility to better enhance their services and retain their current customer base. As with many large enterprises, their network is a complicated, disparate hybrid network of physical data centers and cloud deployments that have grown alongside the organization.
With numerous network operations, a multitude of vendors and partners working within their environment, Prepaid Wireless Group needed to find a way to improve their network visibility and reliability, as well as correct any weaknesses to resolve vulnerabilities.
They need to identify a platform across multiple networks that can integrate with the different applications and tools being used by the various traditional and cloud deployments. A singular platform would reduce the amount of time that the internal team spends troubleshooting and resolving any problems that arise.
The company also struggled with lack of visibility into specific parts of the network, which often led to obscured root causes of issues due to inaccessible data.
Cirries Technologies worked closely with Prepaid Wireless Group to create a virtual network operation center (VNOC), which provided the organization with technical advice and operational support in terms of real-time infrastructure monitoring and maintenance.
Cirries Packet Capture solutions are a hybrid approach that can be deployed on virtual machines, in the Cloud and on standard hardware, making them the ideal solution for a disparate network. By utilizing Garland Technology Passive Fiber Network TAPs in combination with an Advanced Aggregator, Cirries’ PacketPoint suite is able to get 100% network access and visibility. This enables PacketPoint to capture and record packets at speeds up to 100Gbps, then aggregate the raw packet traffic into flow records to be read for real-time analysis, which delivers instant intelligence into network events and activities. Prepaid Wireless Group will now be able to quickly discover any network abnormalities, investigate, and mitigate the issue in a much shorter time frame than previously.
[Want to learn more about the use of Point Suite to perform packet capture? Check out the partnership between Garland Technology and Cirries Technologies for more!]
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.