Packets don’t lie – well, most of the time.

They tell the truth unless they have been captured incorrectly. In those cases, packets can tell bold-faced lies.

When digging through trace files, we can come upon symptoms in the packets that may raise an eyebrow. These are events that look strange on the surface and may even divert our troubleshooting focus for a time. In fact, some of these issues have misdirected engineers for hours, if not days, causing them to chase down issues and events that simply did not exist on the wire.

Since I began my career as a network engineer in the mid ‘90s, I have always considered network uptime and security to be the ultimate metrics against which all innovations in the communications industry should be measured.  

In fact, these two principles were the guiding force behind my seminal work designing a network TAP and the reason that Garland Technology today is a successful American enterprise with solutions deployed worldwide.

In a previous blog, we explained what makes Garland TAPs different from the competitors.

In this post, I'll explain why Garland takes extra steps to ensure a quality made and tested network TAP, and the importance of US manufacturing.

“How do you scale your network infrastructure to support multiple monitoring tools (at varying network speeds) without adding additional infrastructure - while still ensuring data quality?”

This is the problem we have been hearing in the last few years. Data centers (D1 & D2) and enterprise networks have many challenges and two of the big ones are providing the IT department anytime access to full-duplex traffic, while guaranteeing full packet capture. Now layer on top of that a stack of 1G legacy monitoring tools in addition to the migration to 10G/40G and 100G speeds.

To this problem, we introduce a solution:
Garland Technology’s new Passive Fiber Modular Chassis.

A flexible, scalable and affordable high density solution for managing up to 24 links in a 1U box at network speeds of 1G/10G/40G/100G.

The demand for more greater energy efficiency and the commoditization of connectivity have made the smart grid an inevitability.

It’s easy to get caught up in the rush for smart grid support. However, while the world analyzes the efficiency of a more connected utilities industry, you’re left wondering how to maintain security.

The era of the smart grid is here—it’s time we focus on making security practical.

I was thinking the other day, that wouldn’t it be handy to have one, centralized, page on our website that would consolidate all of our really great educational content regarding network TAPs. This way, when I’m talking to potential customers or resellers, I could direct them to this Network TAP page and they could learn all about the different functionality of our products.

Well, we did it, let me show you…