I was recently reading an article in TechCrunch titled “The Problem With The Internet Of Things,” where the author lamented how bad design or rollout of good ideas can kill promising markets. In his example, he discussed how turning on the lights in a room, through the Internet of Things (IoT), became a five step process rather than the simple one step process we currently use (the light switch). This illustrates the problem between the grand idea, and the practicality of the market: it’s awesom...

Trying to detect intrusions in your network and extracting data from your network is a tricky business. Deep insight requires a deep understanding of the context of your network traffic—where are connections coming from, where are they going, and what are the specific applications in use. Without this breadth of insight, you can’t take action to stop and remediate attacks, especially from Advanced Persistent Threats (APT). To see how Ixia helps its customers gain this actionable insight into the...

When chasing security or performance issues in a data center, the last thing you need is packet loss in your visibility fabric. In this blog post I will focus on the importance of how to deal with multiple tools with different but overlapping needs. Dealing with overlapping filters is critical, in both small and large visibility fabrics. Lost packets occur when filter overlaps are not properly considered. Ixia’s NTO is the only visibility platform that dynamically deals with all overlaps to ensu...

Ixia (Nasdaq: XXIA), a leading provider of application performance and security resilience solutions, announced global survey results demonstrating that while most companies believe virtualization technology is a strategic priority, there are clear risks that need to be addressed. Ixia surveyed more than 430 targeted respondents in South and North America (50 percent), APAC (26 percent) and EMEA (24 percent). The accompanying report titled, The State of Virtualization for Visibility Architecture...

We work with majority the top carriers worldwide, as well as many of their largest customers and the companies who provide infrastructure technology for their networks. We’re the “application performance and security resilience” company – we help you make sure technology works the way you expect it to out of the gate, and keeps on doing it throughout the deployment lifecycle. Today’s mobile subscribers are what we call “tough customers”: they expect instant availability and high performance, all...

Visibility Is an Urgent Challenge Lack of visibility is behind the worst of IT headaches, leaving the network open to malicious intrusions, as well as compliance, availability, and performance problems. Today’s soaring traffic volumes are bringing greater complexity, proliferating apps and devices, and rising virtual traffic—in fact, “east-west” traffic between virtual machines now makes up half of all traffic on the network. Virtual traffic is the culprit that spawns unmonitored "blind spots," ...

Ixia is announcing support for OpenFlow SDN in Ixia’s ControlTower architecture. Our best-in-breed Visibility Architecture now extends data center visibility by taking advantage of a plethora of qualified OpenFlow hardware. ControlTower is our innovative platform for distributed visibility launched nearly two years ago. This solution manages a cluster of our Net Tool Optimizers (NTOs) as if you were managing a single logical NTO. At the time of its launch, we leveraged Software Defined Networkin...

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a blog on how to use a network lifecycle approach to improve your network security. I wanted to come back and revisit this as I’ve had a few people ask me why the visibility architecture is so important. They had (incorrectly, IMO) been told by others to just focus on the security architecture and everything else would work out fine. The reason you need a visibility architecture in place is because if you are attacked, or breached, how will you know? During a DDoS ...

We work with more than 40 of the top 50 carriers worldwide, as well as many of their largest customers and the companies who provide infrastructure technology for their networks. We’re the “application performance and security resilience” company – we help you make sure technology works the way you expect it to out of the gate, and keeps on doing it throughout the deployment lifecycle. Today’s mobile subscribers are what we call “tough customers”: they expect instant availability and high perfor...

Ixia (Nasdaq: XXIA), a leading provider of application performance and security resilience solutions, announced an update to its ControlTower distributed network visibility platform that includes support for OpenFlow enabled switches from industry leading manufacturers. ControlTower OpenFlow support has at present been interoperability tested with Arista, Dell and HP OpenFlow enabled switches. “Dell is a leading advocate for standards such as Openflow on our switching platforms to enable rich an...

Network professionals support an increasing number of technologies and services. With adoption of SDN and network function virtualization, troubleshooting becomes more complex. Identify the right NPMD tools to detect application issues, identify root causes and perform capacity planning. Market Definition/Description Network performance monitoring and diagnostics (NPMD) enable network professionals to understand the impact of network behavior on application and infrastructure performance, and co...

Optimizing NFV in Wireless Networks The promise of virtualization looms large: greater ability to fast-track services with lower costs, and, ultimately, less complexity. As virtualization evolves to encompass network functions and more, service delivery will increasingly benefit from using a common virtual compute and storage infrastructure. Ultimately, providers will realize: Lower total cost of ownership (TCO) by replacing dedicated appliances with commodity hardware and software-based control...

Visibility Into Quality What happens when we offload voice traffic to Wi-Fi? As user demand for high-quality anytime, anywhere communications continues growing exponentially, mobile providers are evolving core networks to higher capacity technologies such as 4G LTE. As they do so, mobile network optimization increasingly relies on detecting and preventing potential performance issues. Accomplishing this detection becomes even more challenging, given the expanding mix of tools, probes, interfaces...

Your network infrastructure exists for one reason: to deliver the services and applications that matter to your customers who demand access now, without interruption. Anything that affects your ability to reach customers has a serious impact on your bottom line. High-quality application performance requires real-time awareness of what’s happening on the network. Network operators need to monitor, analyze, and report on transactions throughout the IT environment—whether physical, virtual, or in t...

For most every enterprise, the network is your business. Your network and applications are what connects you to your customers. Maintaining network vitality for an optimal user experience is key to business growth and profitability. But today’s networks are under tremendous pressures. User expectations for high performance and innovative applications are ever-increasing. So too are the frequency, magnitude, and sophistication of security attacks that your adversaries are launching to attempt to ...

Visibility Into the Business With virtualization, "Big Data," and the sheer complexity of enterprise networks on the rise, dynamic network monitoring of performance and security provides a critical business advantage. Ixia's network visibility solutions deliver ongoing insight into production networks to help maximize your company's productivity and profitability, as well as its return on new and existing IT investments. Leveraging state-of-the-art technology and techniques, Ixia's powerful, hig...

Ixia announced enhancements to its network visibility product portfolio, which extends the capabilities of its Visibility Architecture™. With the latest releases incorporating Ixia’s Application and Threat Intelligence, comprehensive solutions come together to meet the needs of enterprises for simplified and actionable network insight. In an increasingly dynamic environment, network administrators are striving for complete network visibility. This level of awareness requires a robust visibility ...

In parts one and two of this blog, I answered an often asked customer question – “What can really be done to improve network visibility?” – with discussions on data and packet conditioning and advanced filtering. In the third part of this blog series, I’ll reveal a third set of features that can further improve network visibility and deliver even more verifiable benefits. Too quickly summarize this multi-part blog covers an in-depth view of various features that deliver true network visibility b...

“What can really be done to improve network visibility?” This is a question that our customers often ask us. They’ve heard about this and that and something else but are often left confused as to what capabilities actually exist in the market to solve their network visibility problems. In this multi-part blog, I’ll provide you an in-depth view of features that will deliver true benefits. There are 5 fundamental feature sets that we’ll cover: Data and packet conditioning Advanced packet filtering...

Ixia's Visibility Architecture solution easily integrates into data center environments to help enterprises and service providers achieve greater visibility into and performance for rapidly growing complex networks. Today's networks continue to grow in size and complexity, presenting new challenges for IT and network administrators. More users are connecting using multiple mobile devices consuming more data from more sources – and many of those apps are hosted on virtualized infrastructure. What...