Feature Benefits
- Increase monitoring tool performance by eliminating analysis of duplicate packets
- Generate more accurate tool statistics and more precise session analysis
- Inspect packets for duplication, recognizing acceptable differences in MACs / VLANs
Challenge
When sending traffic from SPAN ports to monitoring tools, planned hardware redundancies in the data center can lead to unexpected delivery of duplicate copies of network traffic.
This is a problem for the following reasons:
- Duplicate packets take up valuable bandwidth on the ingress port of the tool, resulting in fewer overall packets being inspected. This problem can waste 50-80 percent of tool input bandwidth.
- Duplicates also require processing by the tool itself when analyzing those packets. Additional overhead reduces efficiency and effectiveness of the monitoring appliance.
- Some monitoring tools report errors when duplicate traffic arrives
Solution
Packet De-Duplication on the Anue Net Tool OptimizerTM eliminates redundant data packets at line rate. By eliminating duplicates, most data centers can stand to double or triple tool bandwidth, depending on the volume of packets that are eliminated from the network stream.
Removing duplicates also increases both efficiency and effectiveness of monitoring tools, and prevents unexpected errors that occur when monitoring tools cannot handle duplicate packets aside from reporting errors.