networks ICT
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http://www.dcsuk.info/n/mwsg
Optimising network management in high speed environments
The volume of traffic within networked environments is steadily increasing. In order to address this growth, network operators are moving onto the next step – 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE). While 10GbE speeds will be sufficient for the moment, it will not be long before the 100GbE threshold is breached. As our appetite for network bandwidth continues to increase at breakneck speeds, data centre operations are struggling to keep pace and infrastructure management has become increasingly challenging. The network is the lifeblood of any organisation and ensuring its health is essential to enable revenue generation, sustain and enhance the customer experience, protect data and to ensure compliance. By Trevor Dearing, EMEA marketing director, Gigamon.
AS 10GBE PROVIDES the required bandwidth to support a mix of network services and the increasing network load of today, it is fast becoming the predominant choice for core and distribution networks within modern data centres. Indeed, Dell’Oro Group has forecast that sales of 10 Gigabits per second (Gbps) Ethernet switches are expected to reach $13 billion by 2016, and will constitute nearly half of a total Ethernet switch market1
. However, despite all of its benefits,
the move to 10GbE is presenting a host of new challenges that traditional network management and monitoring solutions just aren’t equipped to deal with.
The challenge of traditional network monitoring Traditionally, network monitoring has been something of an afterthought when designing network environments. However, the accurate monitoring of the newer, higher speed networks is critical and failure to do so effectively is likely to result in costly downtime – which most organisations can ill-afford. As such, effective monitoring strategies and real-time troubleshooting are quickly becoming growing concerns for businesses. However, the race to higher speeds, the emergence of increasingly complex security threats and ruthless compliance requirements, combined with the fact that virtualisation is being adopted into more network architectures means network monitoring is proving to be a challenge.
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www.dcsuk.info I May 2014
While 10GbE monitoring tools are available, they are hugely expensive and, in order to avoid the heavy financial burden many continue to utilise a more traditional approach to network monitoring. This involves directly attaching monitoring tools to each SPAN/mirror port on every switch – which is not only costly, but can also lead to a heavily distorted view of the network, where tools only see a limited segment of the traffic. In addition, as more traffic is being sent to the tool than it can handle, oversubscription can occur, which leads to analytical errors if unwanted packets are received from aggregated and filtered outputs. For instance, using this method, a VoIP analyser would be sent all of the network traffic, rather than just the VoIP traffic it actually needs to see. As networks are upgraded to 10Gbps and higher, this becomes more of a problem as it causes network links to become underutilised and operators are not equipped with the visibility that will allow them to be used to their full capability.
While Deep Packet Inspection is another option that is used by many, it is inherently resource intensive. This method is able to see everything that happens across the network, and across all network layers but, the faster the line rate, the more processing it will take for a tool to filter through the traffic that it needs to see. At 1Gbps line rate, 1Gbps tools may just be able to carry on without becoming oversubscribed, but at 10Gbps, it becomes highly likely that tools
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