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Mobile Network Optimization

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, processes, functions, and servers involved in network monitoring and optimization.

Ixia’s network visibility solutions provide the ongoing data needed for mobile network optimization. They deliver a high-quality subscriber experience reliably and cost-effectively, despite the growing diversity of network technologies, user devices, and security threats. As operational complexity increases, network engineers at leading mobile service providers can leverage Ixia’s suite of network monitoring switches to ensure the end-to-end visibility needed to minimize OPX, sustain profitability, and safeguard quality and user satisfaction.

Ixia’s mobile network visibility solutions deliver:

Traffic optimized for monitoring
Automated troubleshooting to reduce MTTR
A breakthrough “drag and drop” GUI management interface that streamlines configuration
Expanded network monitoring capacity

Carrier-grade Mobile Network Capabilities

Ixia’s expanding suite of network visibility solutions offer a host of new capabilities that equip network engineers at telecommunications providers to achieve end-to-end network visibility—simply and efficiently. NEBS-compliant and suitable for 4G LTE packet cores, these solutions can enable such essential functions as connection of multiple network monitoring tools to a large number of 40GbE, 10GbE, and 1GbE interfaces (up to 16 40GbE ports or up to 64 10GbE ports) in an efficient form factor. Reflecting Ixia’s globally renowned monitoring innovation, these carrier-grade solutions offer such innovative features as:

MPLS and GTP filtering
Custom dynamic filtering to allow visibility into the first 128 bytes of packets
Uninterrupted access for high-availability network monitoring
NEBS certification that ensures robustness
Redundant, hot-swappable power supplies and fan modules
Local and remote alarm relay support
Emergency out-of-band reset
Intuitive drag-and-drop control panel
Aggregation of data from multiple network access points

Ixia provides telecommunications providers easy access to view end-to-end analyses of architected networks, validate field applications, and improve customer loyalty and support. They deliver the actionable insights needed to dynamically detect, avoid and address issues, Overall, Ixia’s robust end-to-end network visibility solutions allow engineers to evaluate and optimize network and application performance under diverse conditions, maximizing ROI and the quality of the user experience.


Net Tool Optimizers Out-of-band traffic aggregation, filtering, dedup, load balancing	GTP Session Controller Intelligent distribution and control of mobile network traffic

Thanks to Ixia for the article.

Application Performance Monitoring

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 the cloud—to identify issues quickly and resolve problems before they disrupt critical services. This means understanding dependencies between applications and the network, being alerted to issues before business is affected, and accelerating troubleshooting.

For most businesses, network performance must now be evaluated and managed from an application perspective. To accomplish this, you need innovative transaction performance management capabilities that help prioritize problem resolution according to business impact.

Ixia Application Performance Monitoring (APM)

Ixia offers a spectrum of intelligent APM capabilities that work with monitoring devices to capture and analyze network traffic in a scalable solution. Ixia APM solutions accurately, efficiently, and non-disruptively direct out-of-band network traffic from multiple access points, whether SPAN ports or TAPs, to the monitoring device for analysis. The result is application awareness that dramatically raises network performance, availability, and security.

Ixia APM enables

Full network visibility. Ixia’s APM solutions deliver all required traffic from anywhere in the network to the monitoring tools, allowing fully 100 percent of traffic to be monitored and analyzed.

Simplified deployment. Flexible enough to work in any network environment, Ixia’s APM shares access with deployed monitoring and security tools.
Streamlined scalability. Ixia’s APM allows you to add 1GE, 10GE, 40GE, or 100GE ports, with filters dynamically adjusted to meet bandwidth requirements.
Effective security. Ixia’s APM automatically directs traffic as needed to a centralized “farm” of cost effective, high-capacity security tools to monitor distributed buildings and network segments. Traffic of interest is returned to the security tool farm for inspection.
Advanced Automation. Ixia’s APM solutions automatically respond in real time to network events that have an impact on applications, including event recording, security analysis, and traffic redirection. This capability improves application performance and availability.

Highlights of Ixia APM

Ixia’s APM’s advanced filtering capabilities work easily with your own monitoring systems across a range of applications. Additionally, our APM performs:

Load-balancing of traffic across multiple monitoring input ports
Dynamic tightening of filters as needed to ensure that key transactions are always analyzed when total traffic spikes over 10Gbps
Traffic redirecting among multiple monitoring appliances on a network to provide high availability
Packet capture on demand, based upon NMS/SIEM alerts

Related Products


Net Tool Optimizers Out-of-band traffic aggregation, filtering, dedup, load balancing	Net Optics Network Taps Passive network access for security and monitoring tools	Phantom Virtualization Tap Passive network access to traffic passing between VMs

Thanks to Ixia for the article.

application performance monitoring Network Access Network Taps

Enterprises- Ensure Application Performance and Security Resilience

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 infiltrate your network, steal data, or disrupt operations.

To achieve a secure network that is resilient to attack requires the selection and deployment of security devices such as firewalls and intrusion prevention. To meet the expectation for application performance, devices such as load balancers, application controllers and performance monitoring tools are also deployed in the network. Ixia is focused on helping to ensure security resilience and application performance in your network.

Security Resilience

The demands on the network are constant and your security must have resilience to maintain its effectiveness as it comes under attack, is challenged to maintain visibility to traffic and events across the network, or just needs an operational change to deploy the latest threat updates. Ixia’s portfolio of security solutions allow enterprises to:

Optimize security device investments such as IPS, Firewall, NGFW or DDoS Mitigation by helping you select the best technology with the right performance and deploying it in the network most effectively with network visibility and optimal load balancing.
Minimize downtime and improve operational change control for security upgrades by validating security updates and changes and providing the inline deployment tools to ensure that these changes are not disruptive to network operations.
Train and prepare for realistic cyber security exercises with systems that can create the real-world application loads and attack traffic required for a cyber range and also provide the visibility required to stream high volumes of events to SOC tools to monitor the exercises.

Application Performance

It has become critical to assess applications and their performance not only before going live to ensure they are customer-ready, but that performance is maintained over time by monitoring the network — ensuring visibility into key application flows, anywhere on the network. Ixia’s portfolio of application performance solutions allow enterprises to:

Validate and assess application performance across your network with real-world application load testing and simulate applications for thousands of wireless or wired endpoints
Gain confidence for virtualization migrations by testing new deployments and removing any of the network visibility blind spots created by adoption of virtualization
Maintain application performance and ease of operation by getting the right information to the right application performance and network monitoring tools
Extend the life of IT tool investments and maximize the usefulness of the current tool capacity with the deployment of physical taps, virtual taps, bypass switches, and network packet brokers

Thanks to Ixia for the article.

application performance monitoring Network Access Network Monitoring Network Security Network Taps

Network Performance Monitoring

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, high-performance network monitoring switches equip network engineers to meet the growing challenge of testing, assessing and monitoring complex, high-performance networks with limited access points. These solutions add intelligence between network access points and sophisticated monitoring tools to streamline the flow of data, ensuring that each tool receives the exact information it needs. Data from multiple TAP and SPAN ports is aggregated and multicast to performance and security monitoring tools, providing network operators with maximum visibility into both physical and virtual networks.

Ixia network visibility solutions:

Optimize traffic for monitoring with advanced filtering, aggregation, and replication
Extend investments in 1G monitoring tools to 10G and 40G deployments
Automate troubleshooting to reduce MTTR
Introduce “drag and drop” simplicity to streamline configuration and management
Expand network monitoring capacity enabling simultaneous monitoring of multiple connection points from a single port

Poor application performance leads to poor business performance: lost sales, missed opportunities, inefficient operations, and disgruntled customers, weakening the corporate brand. Mitigating this risk, Ixia’s network visibility solutions equip network engineers to leverage actionable insight—maximizing network and application performance while helping to optimize security, compliance, management, scalability, and ROI.


Net Tool Optimizers Out-of-band traffic aggregation, filtering, dedup, load balancing	Net Optics Network Taps Passive network access for security and monitoring tools

Thanks to Ixia for the article.

application performance monitoring Network Access Network Monitoring Network Performance Network Taps

Ixia Brings Application and Threat Intelligence to Network Visibility

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 architecture that is able to apply context and correlation to network applications incorporating factors such as user location, granular application action, operating system, browser, and handset type across physical- and virtual-source traffic. The addition of these capabilities to Ixia’s Visibility Architecture marks a significant advancement in the tools that IT professionals can leverage to better understand the application performance and security implications of network events.

Updates to Ixia’s Visibility Architecture include:

Application filtering technology – Using Ixia’s ATI Processor, administrators are able to select precise geo-tagged application traffic for forwarding to specific monitoring tools. File transfers to suspicious locations or VoIP connections from a branch office with performance problems can be automatically highlighted and directed to the appropriate tools for immediate analysis.
New high-density platform – Ixia’s ATI Processor is available in the new NTO 6212 packet broker, which enhances Ixia’s NTO family with application brokering and NetFlow generation in an efficient 48-port 1U package.
Advanced packet processing and 100G support – Ixia’s NTO 7300 now supports 100Gb interfaces and 1.8Tb of advanced processing (such as header stripping and deduplication), the highest capacity and density in the industry by a substantial margin.
Monitoring of financial feeds – Ixia’s recent TradeView release allows for the monitoring of market data down to the channel level providing early warning of health issues with channel feeds that can save millions in revenue lost to trading errors.

Industry Commentary:

“As the number of data sources and customer expectations for always-on access continue to rise, its imperative that IT professionals have the right tools to keep networks running securely and at optimal performance,” said Jim Rapoza, Senior Research Analyst, Aberdeen Group. “To accomplish this, organizations must have visibility solutions that provide immediate insight into events in order to capture more accurate application and network data.”

“Application Intelligence is the next wave of network visibility, yielding deeper insight and faster resolution times,” said Scott Register, Senior Director, Product Management for Ixia. “Our recent advances demonstrate our commitment to providing our customers with the most advanced, efficient and comprehensive visibility solution in the industry.”

Thanks to Ixia for the article.

Network Access Network Monitoring Network Security

Security & Compliance Monitoring

High-stakes Monitoring

Global finance moves fast. When data and transactions don’t take place as smoothly or securely as expected, the company’s revenues and reputation may instantly suffer, causing valued customers to seek more reliable providers. Regulatory requirements are also growing, creating a greater need for security and compliance monitoring.

To mitigate risk and ensure performance, Ixia’s network visibility solutions deliver the ongoing data needed to dynamically detect, avoid, and address issues that affect production networks, private clouds, and applications. With security and compliance monitoring requirements increasing and physical networks becoming more complex, the Ixia suite of network monitoring switches optimizes use of network monitoring access points and overcomes hardware limitations for increased visibility at reduced cost.

Leveraging industry-leading network visibility technology, Ixia’s solutions enable engineers running the world’s most demanding networks to:

Minimize latency and speed transaction times
Prevent fraud and secure data across multiple networks and private cloud infrastructures
Maintain compliance with rigorous regulatory standards associated with PCI-DSS and other governance
Maximize existing investments while evolving to 40Gbps and beyond
Demonstrate fairness to customers and compliance with requirements tied to Service Level Agreements

Ixia’s suite of solutions also supports testing, assessing and optimizing of network and application performance, security, compliance, and management under diverse conditions. These breakthrough solutions deliver:

Increased network visibility by efficiently providing network, application, and security monitoring tools the exact data they need
Expanded network monitoring capacity with aggregation, filtering, and replication of data enabling simultaneous monitoring of multiple connection points from a single port
Maximum tool utilization extending 1Gbps monitoring tools to 10Gbps and 40Gbps networks to defer costly upgrades
Automated troubleshooting that reduces mean time to repair (MTTR)
Industry-first “drag and drop” interface that speeds and simplifies configuration and management

Related Products


Net Tool Optimizers Out-of-band traffic aggregation, filtering, dedup, load balancing	Net Optics Network Taps Passive network access for security and monitoring tools	Phantom Virtualization Tap Passive network access to traffic passing between VMs	Net Optics Network Packet Brokers Inline traffic aggregation, filtering, deduplication and load balancing for monitoring tools	Ixia Application and Threat Intelligence Processor Better data for better decisions

Resources

The Real Secret to Securing your Network

Thanks to Ixia for the article.

Network Access Network Monitoring Network Security Network Taps

BYOD Monitoring

A Corporate Conundrum

With possession being 9/10th of the law, the bring your own device (BYOD) trend creates a conundrum for enterprises. BYOD is the policy of allowing employees to bring personally owned mobile devices to their place of work and use them to access company resources such as email, file servers, and databases. It is also fairly common to mix personal and professional data on single device or across multiple mobile options.

BYOD is becoming increasingly prevalent in enterprises, as employees enjoy using their familiar technology of choice over corporate-mandated equipment. But since employees actually own the devices they’re using to perform corporate work and send or receive business-related communications, how can IT control the security and performance of corporate applications and assets?

There are more questions than answers currently as IT struggles to deal with the impacts of BYOD. The move away from standard, corporate-controlled endpoints is fraught with peril.

BYOD Challenges

With employee-owned devices, the amount of control IT has over the endpoints is a gray area. Can they monitor it, or does monitoring violate employee privacy? Can they take actions to protect the device without employee permission?
Privacy rights of the employee are extremely sticky when dealing with BYOD, especially in certain parts of Europe where employers are subject to strict privacy laws.
When an employee-owned device is lost or stolen, does IT have the right to remotely wipe the device? What about personal data the employee has on the device?
With BYOD, instead of IT worrying about one device per employee, a single employee might use 2-3 or more devices to access corporate resources.
It should be assumed that BYOD endpoints are security risks, due to a lack of corporate control over the devices.
BYOD users expect the speed and performance they are accustomed to on their local desktops, so IT planning for sufficient capacity is key. SLAs must be defined for the BYOD infrastructure, as well as a centralized management capability.
A successful BYOD strategy must also take compliance under consideration and build in the auditing and reporting capabilities that are crucial to compliance.

The Ixia BYOD Solution

The Ixia BYOD solution is an essential element of a BYOD strategy. We help enterprises planning or already maintaining BYOD by remediating security and performance impacts on corporate networks due to uncontrolled endpoints.

With Ixia’s BYOD solution, you can monitor the corporate network actively, with no sacrifice of network access for your security and performance tools. Our BYOD line:

Protects corporate IT assets responsibly
Aggregates, filters and replicates traffic so all security tools get the right data
Increases monitoring tool performance and improves tool accuracy
Speeds incident remediation, delivering granular access control to network data and automated responses for adaptive monitoring when anomalous behavior is detected
Reduces exposure of sensitive data with filtering and stripping capabilities

Ixia enables the real-time monitoring to address critical business needs at gigabit speeds, while providing insights and analysis on a sub-minute level. We provide the application-specific intelligence that’s critical to timely root cause analysis for BYOD security—including identification of actual user names, individual VoIP calls, and deep visibility of email traffic. With a near real-time and historical view of key performance indicators (KPIs)—including traffic volume, top talkers, application and network latency, and application distribution—IT can monitor bandwidth usage and acquire needed information to quickly resolve application performance issues. IT can also perform capacity planning and trend analysis to see how the BYOD program affects the baseline of network resources.

Related products


Net Tool Optimizers Out-of-band traffic aggregation, filtering, dedup, load balancing	Net Optics Network Taps Passive network access for security and monitoring tools

Thanks to Ixia for the article.

Network Access Network Management Network Taps

Ixia’s new Ebook- The Network Through a New Lens: How a Visibility Architecture Sharpens the View

“Enter the Visibility Architecture”

“Buying more tools to deal with spiraling demands is counter-productive – it’s like trying to simplify a problem by increasing complexity. Visibility merits its own architecture, capable of addressing packet access and packet stream management. A visibility architecture that collects, manages, and distributes packet streams for monitoring and analysis is ideal for cost-savings, reliability, and resilience. The economic advantages of such end to-end visibility are beyond debate.

An architectural approach to visibility allows IT to respond to the immediate and long-range demands of growth, management, access, control, and cost issues. This architecture can optimize the performance and value of tools already in place, without incurring major capital and operational costs. With the ability to see into applications, a team can drill down instantly from high-level metrics to granular details, pinpoint root causes and take action at the first—or even before the first – sign of trouble – lowering Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) dramatically.

A scalable visibility architecture provides resilience and control without adding complexity. Because lack of access is a major factor in creating blind spots, a visibility architecture provides ample access for monitoring and security tools: network taps offer reliable access points, while NPBs contribute the advanced filtering, aggregation, deduplication, and other functions that make sure these tools see only traffic of interest.

Application- and session-aware capabilities contribute higher intelligence and analytical capabilities to the architecture, while policy and element management capabilities help automate processes and integrate with existing management systems. Packet-based monitoring and analysis offers the best view into the activity, health, and performance of the infrastructure. Managing a visibility architecture requires an intuitive visual/ graphical interface that is easy to use and provides prompt feedback on operations – otherwise, architecture can become just another complexity to deal with.”

The Ixia Network Visibility Architecture encompasses network and virtual taps, as well as inline bypass switches; inline and out-of-band NPBs; application-aware and session aware monitoring, and a management layer.

Download the ebook here

Thanks to Network World for the article.

application aware network performance management Network Access Network Management Network Performance Network Taps

Do You Really Know What’s Lurking in Your Data Center?

As mentioned in one of my previous blogs (Exposing The Ghost In The Virtual Machine), virtualization has been a great success story. At the same time, it holds hidden dangers that need to be managed. I want to take a couple minutes to outline those dangers and how to overcome them.

So, here are the dangers that can be hidden in a virtualized data center:

Potential security issues due unknown malware
Potential outages due to lack of proper performance data
Regulatory compliance issues due to lack of adequate policy tracking

According to a study commissioned by Cisco Systems, 29% of the North American organizations surveyed identified the overall state of security of virtual systems as a major concern for future server virtualization deployments. This is for good reason. Cyber criminals are employing VM-aware malware that can spread unnoticed and unchecked among VMs due to lack of visibility between machines on the same server. This allows VM-aware malware to unknowingly spread to physical servers when moving VMs or applications. Without proper visibility, these threats can gain a foothold and then flourish within your data center – and you wouldn’t even know it.

Another concern is potential outages that can result from malware or other issues within the data center (problematic software upgrades, overloaded equipment and links, and programming mistakes). Common symptoms of performance problems can include: slow traffic and devices, unnecessary bandwidth consumption, and intermittent issues that pop-up long enough to be noticed but then disappear quickly. By the time you recognize the symptoms, it’s often too late as the problems have the ability to be service affecting. Proper performance monitoring mitigates this concern by allowing IT managers to perform trend analysis and monitor single points of failure – like load balancers, cloud services, WAN optimizers, etc.

Regulatory compliance is a third fundamental concern. Much emphasis has been placed on this topic over the last several years, and while you may have everything in order on the physical components of your network, it’s often harder to square away the virtualized portion of the network. One of the main reasons is audit validation. What’s your current plan to know if you are compliant with all applicable regulations (e.g., FISMA, HIPAA, PCI, etc.)? And do you have the proper access to data in the virtualized portion of your network to prove that you are compliant? The business concern, of course, is that if one portion of your network is non-compliant then the company is non-compliant (or partially compliant, if you have some marketing spin leeway!).

The key question is how do you find the source of the hidden dangers within your virtual network? Your primary target should be the data center. According to a study by Gartner, up to 80% of the traffic in a virtualized data center never makes it to the top of the rack, where conventional monitoring practices like packet brokers and monitoring tools can capture the data. So, are you sure you know what’s happening in your data center before this point? Most data center managers don’t.

This diagram should make it a little clearer. It shows the four key visibility points in a virtual network. Point number 1 isn’t a problem. Since the data is transferred from the equipment in one rack to another, this gives the data center administrator an opportunity to use a physical tap to access the data. But for situations 2 through 4, there is no easy access with standard taps and monitoring tools.

In the case of point number 2, there is limited visibility within the server chassis. The traffic across the backplane isn’t accessible by traditional monitoring tools.

In case number 3, the traffic passes between VMs within the same physical host. In this case, everything is handled strictly through software. So again, there is no opportunity for traditional monitoring tools and practices to help.

And in case number 4 (when VMs are moved) any access to the VM that might have been established is typically lost.

Points 2 through 4 are what we mean when we talk about the opportunity for blind spots to exist. The blind spots are where the hidden dangers lurk. Traditional monitoring tools won’t help as they don’t give you access to the data in this portion of the network.

So now we see the problem, but how do you fix it? A virtual tap is often one of the best solutions. They are cost effective pieces of software that can be installed directly into the virtual data center. They function in a similar manner as a physical tap in that they replicate traffic and forward that data on. This gives you the access points you need to forward traffic out of the data center and towards your standard monitoring gear, like packet brokers and specialized monitoring analysis tools.

One note, not all virtual taps are created equal. You probably want to make sure that the virtual tap performs some level of filtering so that the replicated traffic isn’t a complete copy of everything in your data center. Otherwise, you’ll overload the LAN. Also, you’ll want hypervisor plug-in capability to maximize your access to the virtual traffic. Lastly, consider virtual taps that have minimal performance impacts on the hypervisor or you can actually create potential performance problems. There are products on the market that perform all three functions.

Once the virtual tap(s) is inserted into you data center, you’ll have the data you need to implement proactive, instead of reactive, approaches to problem resolution and security threats. You’ll also be able to implement the same internal security and monitoring policies across your network which should help greatly with work flows, problem resolution capabilities and even costs.

Ixia makes a virtual tap product called the Ixia Phantom vTap. More information about the Ixia Phantom vTap and how it can help generate the insight needed for your business is available on the Ixia website.

Additional Resources:

Illuminating Data Center Blind Spots

Increased Visibility and Monitoring of Virtual Systems

Creating A Visibility Architecture

Thanks to Ixia for the article.

Network Access Network Performance