SCENARIO
Organizations are dealing with greater data volume and at greater speeds. They require capabilities to manage the security and monitoring of the information that traverses their networks. Organizations need more intelligent ways to deal with data ranging from the ability to manipulate packets in out-of-band monitoring to more sophisticated levels of filtering of L2–4 traffic.
Moreover, one of the biggest challenges facing network administrators today is complete network visibility that extends past L4 information. Many applications run over Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) within your network or cloud infrastructure and, thus, can be obscured. SSL encryption can also hide data needed for monitoring, as well as security threats, like malware.
Access to real-time application data for monitoring tools empowers IT professionals to make better decisions with better data. Application intelligence provides rich data on the behavior and location of users and applications. This allows IT teams to identify unknown network applications, mitigate network security threats from suspicious applications and locations, and spot trends in application usage to predict and forestall congestion.
IXIA’S VISIBILITY INTELLIGENCE SOLUTIONS
To address these needs, Ixia has a full visibility intelligence portfolio. Beginning at NetStack, there is foundational L2–4 based filtering plus aggregation, replication, and load-balancing. Even these are offered with a dynamic filter compiler to automatically resolve overlapping rules, so setting up and managing rules is simple. But, Ixia goes beyond that to offer to offer additional filtering capabilities.
Ixia’s PacketStack allows organizations to filter, manipulate, and transport data. Some highlights of these capabilities include:
• The ability to de-duplicate data to reduce bandwidth to security and monitoring tools.
• Strip headers, trim packets, and more to ensure the packet size, content, and format aligns to the security and monitoring tools receiving the information.
• Support generation of NetFlow v9 and v10 (IPFIX) and up to 10 NetFlow.
Additionally, Ixia has SecureStack and AppStack capabilities to address the need for filtering beyond L4 and to address encrypted traffic. SecureStack and AppStack include:
• dynamic and signature-based application detection, filtering, and monitoring.
• SSL decryption capability with stateful decrypted output.
• enables application tracking by bandwidth, session, and geography.
• includes IxFlow (Ixia’s proprietary valueadd extensions to NetFlow) and other information like device, browser, OS, and more.
• data masking plus with pre-defined credit card formats to help with PCI-DSS, HIPAA, and other regulatory compliance items.
• hitless upgrades.
Moreover, SecureStack and AppStack can be used in addition to NetStack and PacketStack. They can also be used for inline deployments.