Together, Riverbed and Garland Technology provide end-to-end network visibility.

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Unified visibility across packet, flow, and device metrics

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Alluvio NPM products provide a complete picture of the health of your network, but monitoring tools are only as good as the information they are receiving. Garland’s Network TAPs are purpose-built appliances that provide the passive access to packets that Alluvio NPM products depend on.

Figure 1: This is an example of a network architecture with Alluvio NPM solutions supported by Garland TAPs and Aggregators

TAP THE WAN

Using a Garland TAP between the ethernet handoff and the gateway router will provide visibility into the traffic coming in from a WAN, Metro Ethernet, or data encapsulated with MPLS labels. This un-processed traffic will offer a baseline dataset that can be used against processed traffic to determine the efficiency of security tools on the network.

TAP THE EDGE

The edge of the network handles the routing and security of both ingress and egress network traffic. This is a critical point in the network where network intrusions are stopped, malware is blocked, and bandwidth statistics are gathered. Garland’s EdgeLens® fail-safe bypass TAP in this location will increase the resiliency of the network edge by preventing the security appliances from becoming a point of failure, while providing Alluvio NPM visibility into this important area.

MANAGEMENT NETWORK

Garland’s PacketMAX™ Advanced Aggregators are devices that collect and distribute the monitoring traffic from the TAPs to Alluvio AppResponse. Advanced Aggregators are also capable of pre-filtering traffic prior to sending to multiple monitoring tools for advanced filtering or take the place of packet brokers in applications where simple aggregation and L2-L4 filtering is required.

TAP THE ACCESS LAYER

If the Distribution layer gives a total view, the access layer will provide a more detailed and granular view typically used in troubleshooting cases. At this layer a Garland TAP can provide specific information on individual users, workstations, or VoIP connections. While this information can be aggregated to Alluvio appliances at higher levels of the network, tapping the access layer on a need-to-know basis grants visibility into an area with a considerably more manageable and targeted dataset that can be viewed using Alluvio NPM.

TAP THE INSIDE

While the edge of the network is important, a Garland TAP placed on the inside will also provide valuable information. Tapping the connection to servers will grant visibility into who or what is establishing connections to which server. This information can be used to determine when network and server upgrades may be needed or even used to prevent internal threats that never reach the edge.

TAP THE DISTRIBUTION LAYER

Using Garland TAPs with distribution layer switches will give an aggregated view of specific areas of your organization. If different departments are separated by network segments, a TAP can provide insight into bandwidth and application usage on a large scale in the Alluvio platform.

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This example shows how Alluvio AppResponse can obtain monitor streams from multiple 10Gb network links.

By using Garland’s high density, modular fiber network TAPs, the traffic going over 10 10Gbps multimode network links can be unobtrusively copied, bit-for-bit. The passive fiber TAP is a breakout TAP meaning each direction of traffic will generate its own monitor link, eastbound traffic out Port C and westbound traffic out Port D. The 20 10Gb monitor links generated from the TAP would then be terminated into the Garland Advanced Features box, which then load balances the output to the Alluvio AppResponse 8180.