Gigamon's Out-of-Band Monitoring Provides Scalable VoIP Testing

Gigamon Systems, a start-up based in San Jose, California, is positioning its GigaVUE-MP Data Access Switch as a scalable means of providing VoIP monitoring and testing. The Gigamon switch solves the problem of "too many tools and not enough access points or SPAN ports" by creating an "out-of-band" monitoring network that brings all critical data to the VoIP analyzer, enabling other tools to share the data view for security or monitoring purposes. The platform aggregates traffic from multiple network segments and access points, separating VoIP from non-VoIP data. It uses hardware packet-based filters and logically divides and maps this aggregated VoIP traffic to multiple VoIP analyzers in order to guarantee optimal traffic load. The entire flow of VoIP calls may be monitored en mass, or it cal drill down to a single call.



By filtering, aggregating, and multicasting traffic critical data to support multiple network monitoring tools, GigaVUE-MP enables more flexible network security, monitoring and troubleshooting while using far fewer and less intrusive tools.



Key switching functionality includes any-to-any, any-to-many, many-to-any, and packet filtering with the ability to map specific traffic flows to designated test tools.



Gigamon said deploying multiple distributed analyzers to cover all the possible paths in redundant asynchronously routed networks is cost prohibitive, and still likely to miss packets or entire calls.



http://www.gigamon.com