TAP into Technology | Garland Technology Blog

Overcoming 100G Bandwidth Demands in Network Monitoring

Written by Chris Bihary | 8/8/17 12:00 PM

100G networks are no longer the future talk for many data center, telco and enterprise network architects. The 100G future is here - our consumption of everything video - including YouTube, Facebook Live, Netflix and Amazon Video will continue to drive this demand to beyond 100G.

But for today, how do you handle monitoring at 100G speeds? Is there a scalable way to address increased traffic volume that still accommodates monitoring tools at 10G?

As network speeds increase, monitoring and security solutions need to keep pace by providing real-time and accurate analysis for security and network administrators to stay aware of operational and security issues. At Garland we have several technology partners that specialize in high speed and high performance monitoring technologies that use behavior analytics.

End-to-End High Speed Monitoring Solutions

Flowmon Networks is a long-standing pioneer in delivering monitoring and security tools for high-speed networks. Garland Technology and Flowmon formed a technology partnership in June 2016. Through collaboration, both parties have introduced a joint end-to-end solution for the management and security of high-speed, 100G networks. “We really appreciate Garland's focus and deep expertise in tapping and packet broker technologies for 100G environment. adds Jiri Tobola, VP of Sales and Alliances at Flowmon Networks.

Accolade Technology is the technology leader in high performance packet capture and application acceleration adapters/NICs. Garland Technology and Accolade Technology began a technology partnership in June 2015 through collaborative testing, measurement and validation of Garland’s 10G, 40G and 100G passive fiber network TAPs with Accolade’s ANIC adapters which are widely deployed within global OEM tier 1 network monitoring, security and OEM customer appliances. “We have rigorously tested our products against Garland Technology’s comprehensive line of 10G, 40G and 100G passive fiber network TAPs, and Garland’s TAPs exceeded the demanding benchmarks and high performance requirements of our mission critical testing protocol.”said Robbie Dhillon, CEO of Accolade Technology.

Big Switch Networks, the leader in open SDN fabrics partnered with Garland Technology to enable high performance network visibility and security in 2015. Garland and Big Switch enable simple, highly scalable and cost-effective monitoring for all network traffic, including joint solutions for 10G, 40G and 100G network access and visibility.“We are partnering with Garland to deliver fully interoperable 10G, 40G, and now 100G monitoring solutions for high-performance data center visibility and security,” said Prashant Gandhi, Vice President of Products and Strategy at Big Switch Networks.

Edgecore Networks, Edgecore Networks is the leader in open networking, providing a full line of 1G, 10, 25G, 40G, 50G and 100G open and OCP switches that offer choice of NOS and SDN software for data center, telecommunications and Enterprise network use cases. Garland Technology and Edgecore have deployed numerous open networking joint solutions globally for 10G, 25G, 40G and 100G SDN data centers.

Feeding the Monitoring Solution

To deliver data-driven network monitoring and security solutions - the data needs to be 100% accurate, have zero dropped or distorted packets, accurate relationships of frames, spacing or response times - while not affecting the live network traffic. That is why our partners rely on getting data from the live wire. A passive fiber TAP is simply a ‘bump in the wire’ and can be used in networks of all speeds.

Learn more > Read the 101 Series on Passive Fiber Network TAPs

Developing a Comprehensive Monitoring Strategy

Where do you send the data once you get it? Most of the monitoring tools on the market will not support, or won’t need 100G of data. To optimize the performance of your monitoring tools, the data can be sent to a network packet broker where it can perform:

Filtering - Send only the traffic required to the monitoring tool
Aggregation - Send traffic to one or many links
Load Balance - Balance traffic across multiple ports, 10G, 25G, and 40G to allow multiple tools to handle higher network speeds

If you’re planning ahead or your 100G future is today, be sure your data capture plan is an integrated part of your overall monitoring solution. The tool is only as good as the data is sees, with a Garland TAP we guarantee you’ll see every bit, byte and packet®.