Network Visibility – Packet Brokers

Visibility into network traffic is paramount to understanding how the costly network resource is used, both in terms of intended and unintended use. This typically includes visibility from a utilization, performance as well as security perspective. Metrics gleaned from packet captures are fed into IDS or performance monitoring tools which help visualize the use through reporting and alerting when thresholds are breached or malicious traffic is identified.
The biggest challenge to any such tools however is that networks have become complex on the one hand and carry huge volumes of traffic on the other.

With more East-West traffic between centers and local internet breakout, less traffic actually flows through the data center where tools are typically centralized. Similarly, Network tooling cannot consume all layers of all network traffic and many tools only require only certain traffic from specific locations. They may also only require packet headers and not the complete packet.
Thus a need exists to slice and dice packets in some locations and send those for further processing to the central location where they may be consumed by IDS and performance tools. This is the role of packet brokers, to provide deduplicating of redundant packets, load balancing, offloading SSL decryption, data masking, and protocol header stripping functions. The challenge is to process packets at significant line rates without dropping any packets.

Keysight’s extensive range of packet brokers caters to the wide range of applications and network speeds whilst at all times performing at full line rates without packet loss. Keysight’s network packet brokers are optimized with a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) which accelerates the packet processing engine of the NPB, offering significant architectural benefits that translate to greater TCO. Keysight NPBs can operate in active-active mode, so for tooling implemented with fail-over, recovery is instantaneous.