Net Optics expands data monitoring switch family
Net Optics announced the expansion of its Director data monitoring switch family with the addition of Director 5400 and advanced load balancing functionality across the entire portfolio of Director products.
The new Director 5400 provides 34 1-Gigabit ports in a 1U chassis, plus two 10-Gigabit ports for daisy-chaining chassis to expand the system. Up to 10 Director 5400 and 7400 appliances can be daisy-chained to act as a single logical unit with as many as 380 ports. Moreover, SR, LR, and ER 10-Gbps daisy-chain links support a reach as far as 40 km or 25 miles, enabling an entire campus or metro area to be monitored by a single logical Director installation. The 10G ports can also be used for network or tool connections when they are not used for expansion.
Director’s load balancing feature enables network and security professionals to split network traffic into multiple streams so the data can be processed by two or more tools working in parallel. The load balancing takes the traffic from any network port or aggregated set of network ports and distributes it to two to 10 monitor ports. The load can be balanced by IP address, port, protocol, VLAN, and MAC address, or any other packet header field. Network managers have the ability to use multiple IPS appliances, VoIP quality and billing systems, streaming video and forensic recorders without having to pay for other more expensive application monitoring solutions on the market.
With only a 1U rack size and minimal power requirements, the product reduces the wiring closet footprint and power consumption for monitoring access. In addition to the solution’s ability to connect any network feed to any monitoring tool, aggregate multiple feeds down to a single pair, reduce the overall footprint of the monitoring access solution and provide remote visibility and control, Director also:
- Aggregates traffic from multiple links to a single tool, enabling tools to see more traffic at once
- Regenerates the same traffic stream to multiple tools, enabling multiple types of analysis to operate in parallel, or multiple engineers to work on the same traffic stream independently without conflict
- Filters the traffic by protocol, IP address, or other criteria to drill down on problems and prevent tool overload
- Downshifts 10 Gigabit traffic so it can be viewed by 1 Gigabit tools
- Upshifts 1 Gigabit links or traffic aggregated from many 1 Gigabit links so it can be viewed by 10 Gigabit tools.
The pricing for Director 5400 starts at $15,500.