RSA 2008: Solera Networks extends network visibility with virtual regeneration tap

Solera Networks announced the availability of its beta version of the free Solera V2P Tap, expanding the company’s initiative toward enabling complete network visibility. Using the Solera V2P Tap, organizations deploying virtual machines can now leverage their existing investments in network management and security tools by regenerating virtual network traffic, including intra-server virtual machine network traffic, to their existing physical security infrastructure to monitor and protect virtual network activity, creating significant cost savings and efficiencies.

For many organizations, monitoring and securing the virtual environment means an additional investment to deploy security tools and processes in the virtual network—the same tools they already have in the physical environment. The Solera V2P Tap sits passively in a virtual environment leveraging VMware Vswitch technology, capturing all network traffic from within the virtual environment and regenerating all or some of that traffic in real-time to the physical environment for monitoring and analysis by existing tools.

The Solera V2P Tap allows organizations to utilize their existing intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDS/IPS), as well as other standard security tools to analyze traffic between virtual machines. While originating from the virtual infrastructure, traffic that is regenerated to these security systems appears as any other network traffic and can therefore be analyzed using the same procedures. The virtual tap also runs very efficiently, with minimal CPU utilization. This is particularly important in virtual environments where the objective is to get the most out of processor capacity and minimize hardware cost.