100% Network Visibility using APCON IntellaPatch
Network performance and security monitoring for organizations like banks, investment services, government, and healthcare has become an ever increasing problem. Service level agreements (SLA) and 99.999% uptime requirements often present major cost barriers, as few organizations can afford the large inventory of monitoring tools needed for dedicated 100% network coverage. Individual appliances are expensive, and with so many points on the network to monitor, the APCON IntellaPatch is the cost effective solution many fortune 500 companies rely upon.
Necessity of Coverage and Scalability
Everyone agrees that the cost of downtime is unacceptable, meaning that full network coverage is an IT must. Network managers overcome this hurdle by using a variety of practices, including manual moves and changes, matrix switches, and connecting across VLANs. A manual patching strategy introduces the greatest chance of human error. Even ignoring potential errors, it is time consuming to transport a network tool to where it is needed, whether it is between floors, between facilities, or past physical security barriers. Older style spider-tap or matrix switches are not scalable, and their low individual port count means more devices to manage. The APCON IntellaPatch scalable solution is a faster, more flexible approach to attain the best network coverage possible.
Obstacles with VLAN Monitoring
Electronically moving monitoring tools across many switch connections with a large VLAN can adversely affect network performance, as mirrored traffic moves across the entire backbone. Duplication of packets in high volume situations can affect saturation of a critical link. It is impossible to get the precise data needed to detect and diagnose problems, as it is filtered as it moves across multiple hops between switches. Furthermore, the timestamp at the source will be altered along the way and will not be the true timestamp received remotely by the analyzer.
Network managers agree that this is not a viable strategy for resolving critical enterprise performance issues and outages. While difficult to configure, it is also complicated for network operations support staff to maintain and use. There is also no fail-safe way to guard against a 'SPAN loop.' If traffic re-enters a SPAN port, it will crash every switch in that VLAN, if not the entire network.
The APCON Solution
APCON IntellaPatch is a scaleable solution that allows users to move sniffer tools across a large number of SPAN ports with no possibility of a loop. Users have instant access to any SPAN or TAP point within the IntellaPatch platform via software--without the manual effort. Network topology management is simple with multiple interfaces for NOC and operations users. As one IT manager said, the APCON Matrix Switch was "One of the best purchases of my career of 17 years in the Network/Telecommunications business". Using the APCON solution greatly simplifies network monitoring efforts by connecting any analyzer with a few simple clicks in a GUI or via command line or scripting interfaces.
With 100% network visibility from APCON, you can drastically cut monitoring costs and mean time to resolution in the most complex network infrastructures. Learn more about monitoring with IntellaPatch by visiting APCON at http://www.apcon.com.
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