Aggregation is the action of combining traffic from multiple sources and copying or redirecting it to another, single source. Net Optics Port Aggregator Taps combine both TX and RX traffic from multiple network links and copy it to monitoring tools, Link Aggregation Taps or switches. Net Optics Link Aggregation is transparent and protocol- independent, requiring no support for IEEE 802.3ad, Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP), IEEE 802.1ax, or other proprietary protocols.

Filtering is the ability to accept, drop or redirect network packets using one or more packet attributes based on a pre-defined policy. Net Optics products support filtering based on Ethernet type, Mac address, VLAN address, MPLS header, IP attributes, TCP/IP addresses and ports for both IPv4 and IPv6, as well as user defined filters of the payload and some filtering based on DPI.

Load Balancing is the act of distributing network workload across multiple devices. Net Optics products support static load balancing, using pre-defined load distribution policies, and dynamic load balancing based on real-time traffic characteristics.

Regeneration describes the ability to replicate and duplicate network traffic as it was originally delivered by the network. Regeneration capability allows multiple monitoring and security devices to inspect the same traffic flows without the need to chain or connect multiple tools in a row. Most Net Optics solutions have regeneration capabilities. Specially designed Regeneration Taps regenerate traffic with ultra-low latency, using a patented design.

Network management refers to the activities, methods, procedures, and tools that pertain to the operation, administration, maintenance, and provisioning of networked systems. Network Management Server (NMS) is the platform that is used to manage the network elements. Net Optics Indigo Pro™ is an NMS, designed to centrally manage Net Optics devices and other manageable devices. It provides network discovery, fault management, device configuration, statistics, and reporting. Management tasks include discovering network inventory, monitoring device health and status, providing alerts to conditions that affect system performance, and identification of problems—plus their source(s) and possible solutions.

"The market need for application-aware network packet broker solutions continues to expand due to ever-increasing network complexity and upgrade cycles of network capacity due to the pressure public and private cloud infrastructures place on the network," said Jonah Kowall, Gartner research director. "Network packet brokers make today's increasing data stream manageable. The placement of monitoring tools must be accomplished and tested easily in centralized locations, and NPBs enable better visibility and longevity of tool investments."

Industry, federal and state regulations, as well as privacy acts around the world require implementation of audit and security controls to protect regulated data. Many organizations continue to struggle with regulatory compliance requirements such as PCI-DSS, SOX, HIPAA and others. Implementation of these controls presents a complex IT challenge and cost barriers to achieving compliance. Net Optics solutions
are architected into the network as part of an organization’s Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) strategy to implement efficient controls that monitor activity, audit privileged users, and control access to files, applications, and sensitive data.

Monitoring and Performance lets customers analyze real-time traffic and pinpoint network performance degradation. The increased visibility provided by monitoring and performance enables identification of application problems or issues, as well as isolation to a specific application, location, or user in the network. Monitoring and performance provides tools to measure the network’s performance, latency, and user or application activity to proactively monitor and measure end-to-end performance metrics. This lets you identify the location of bottlenecks along the application delivery path without installing software agents on network elements and servers. Net Optics appTap™ easily monitors and measures the performance of applications and user activity throughout the network.

Application monitoring describes the use of a system to constantly monitor applications behavior to identify slow anomalies or malfunction at the application layer. The system then notifies the network administrator in case of outages or unusual activity. The Net Optics appTap™ provides application- and session-level network monitoring.

Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) is the ability to apply filters to a packet or to multiple packets at any location, regardless of packet length, how “deep” the packet is, or the location of the data to be matched within this packet. A DPI system does not care about header, payload, size or offset of the filter and is totally independent of the packet.

A timestamp provides the exact date and time at which a certain network event occurred. In Access Switching, timestamps are important for measuring the accuracy of monitoring tools. Timestamping can also be used to verify and measure the accuracy and latency of the network and its applications.

Network security consists of the provisions and policies that prevent and monitor unauthorized access, misuse, modification, or denial of the network and network-accessible resources. Network security, as its title implies, secures the network, as well as protects and oversees operations being performed. Net Optics solutions are integrated with the leading security vendors’ equipment to connect with the network in a fail-safe fashion and identify data streams that should be protected.

The term “virtualization” refers to a virtual machine. The creation and management of virtual machines has been called “platform virtualization” or “server virtualization”. Platform virtualization is performed on a given hardware platform by host software, which creates a simulated computer environment—a virtual machine (VM)—for its guest software. The guest software executes as if it were running directly on the physical hardware, with several notable caveats. These caveats include limited visibility into virtualized network activity and performance penalties, both in resources required to run the hypervisor, and in reduced performance on the virtual machine compared to running native on the physical machine.
Net Optics Phantom Virtual Tap™ solves those issues by providing 100 percent visibility of traffic passing between VMs in virtualized computing environments and clouds.

Net Optics Phantom HD provides the ability to strip MPLS labels from packets, enabling non-MPLS-capable network monitoring tools to monitor packets. The device’s logic was built in such a way that a simple MPLS strip command can be used to strip MPLS labels from packets. By using other Phantom HD features such as VLAN tagging, it is possible to add specific VLAN tags to packets. In this way, monitoring tools can handle differently those packets that formerly contained MPLS tags. Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) itself enables you to use non-MPLS monitoring tools to save time and money. You can monitor MPLS traffic even if the analysis tool is not designed to handle MPLS labeling. Thus, you shelter your investment in tools not designed to handle MPLS encapsulated traffic and raise the efficiency of your processing resources. MPLS is a highly scalable, protocol agnostic, data-carrying mechanism that has received broad market attraction in service provider networks. Now, enterprises are increasingly connecting the distributed and extended enterprise via MPLS-based Wide Area Networks (WANs) or deploying their own private MPLS networks. MPLS brings the benefits of circuits to packet-based IP communications, providing consolidation, control, and network resiliency. It simplifies the network, reduces cost, and enables network convergence with greater control and resiliency for the enterprise.

VLAN tagging indicates that the content of a packet inside the layer 2 contains one or more VLAN tags that do not relate to the tagged flows themselves. The process of stripping removes one, two, or all VLAN tags from each packet. Up to three different VLAN Tagged Packet ID (TPID) values can be named in order to identify the VLAN tags that are to be stripped. A combination of the number of these tags to be stripped and the TPID values determines which tags can be removed from each packet. Now filtering and load balancing can be performed on the user session’s layer 3 and layer 4 headers, and beyond—without difficulty.