NetOptics

The cost and complexity of monitoring solutions are increasing at an explosive rate. More kinds of tools need to be deployed across a steadily increasing number of network links because:

• High-speed 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps links generate more traffic than ever needed to be monitored before
• Cost saving  and operational efficiency for monitoring 10G networks using 1G tools without dropping packets or losing visibility
• Converged voice-video-data networks demand specialized tools to optimize different types of traffic
• Security threats are expanding and becoming more advanced on a daily basis requiring more advanced solutions

Industry’s Highest-Port-Density Monitoring Access Solution

Net Optics Director with TapFlow™ filtering technology enables your pool of monitoring tools to handle more traffic, more links, and more protocols than ever before. TapFlow filtering ensures that each tool sees only the traffic of interest for its particular purpose, without missing critical data.

Director models are available with up to 38 network ports: 24 ports are available with 2 field-upgradable Director Network Modules (DNMs) supporting Gigabit SX (50/62.5µm) or LX (8.5µm) or ZX (8.5µm) Fiber or 10/100/1000 Copper media, 10 1-Gbps fixed SFP and up to 4 10G XFP ports. Altogether, you can monitor up to 26 SPAN ports or 12 inline links and up to 12 monitoring tools.

Aggregation, Regeneration, and Switching
Director provides one-to-one, many-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many mappings of network links and Span ports to monitor ports. Director aggregates, regenerates, switches, and filters traffic completely at line speed, even for fully-utilized 10-Gbps ports.

TapFlow™ Filtering
High-speed, multi-protocol aggregated traffic streams can be challenging for monitoring tools to handle. Often, tools use front-end pre-filters simply to strip off traffic of interest—such as VoIP traffic for a VoIP performance analysis tool—while discarding the rest of the packets. This seemingly simple operation can consume a significant amount of a tool’s processing power because it must handle every single packet on the wire. Director restores these vital processing cycles for monitoring tools by utilizing TapFlow. This does the pre-filtering job for them, selecting traffic by protocol type, IP address, port number, and even packet payload information, and sending each tool only the necessary traffic of interest.

Load Balancing
Load Balancing allows traffic to be split into multiple streams so the data can be processed by two or more tools working in parallel. Director’s load balancing capability takes the traffic from any network port or aggregated set of network ports and distributes it among anywhere from two to ten monitor ports. The load can be balanced by IP address, port, protocol, VLAN, and MAC address, or by any other packet header field or its combination.

Daisy-Chain Expansion
Do your monitoring needs call for more than 38 ports? With Director, this is not a problem, because up to 10 Director nodes can be daisy-chained together to act as a single logical unit with up to 380 ports and industry-leading total throughput of 740Gbps. 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. Policies and filters are defined on the master and populated automatically among daisy chain members.

Enterprise Manageability
Director takes enterprise manageability to a whole new level. It is super-packed with functionality that is needed to manage the device and the network efficiently. Configuring and managing Director(s) is simplified by Indigo™ Management software.

The task oriented command-line interface (CLI) enables any Director parameters or filters to be checked or changed with a few keystrokes. Managing Director via Web GUI is a breeze, thanks to its simple-to-use yet powerful design. 

Configure, Manage and Monitor Director with SNMP. Director’s SNMP support is fully capable and complete including advanced support of SNMP v3. All three interfaces are password-protected. Role Based Access Control is accessible through a secure, dedicated management port.  

Director supports TACACS+ and RADIUS authentication and authorization. Director’s syslog support means that you can send log messages to remote servers of your choice as well as set the level of messages to be sent to each server. Most importantly, Director syslog is RFC 5224-complaint.

Filter Tagging

Filter tagging is ideal for situations in which you need to identify individual input streams within aggregated traffic. It allows you to identify packets that came from specific ports or filters that directed those packets. Filter tagging adds a user-defined VLAN tag to packets—enabling tools to identify the input ports.

Modularity
Director makes extensive use of modular interface technology to eliminate the headache of matching interfaces between monitoring tools and links. All Director monitor ports use SFP or XFP modular transceivers, so virtually any monitoring tool can be accommodated. In addition, DNMs are available for copper and Gigabit SX(50/62.5µm) or LX(8.5µm) or ZX(8.5µm) Fiber  in both in-line and Span versions, increasing the flexibility of media type support.

Dual Hot-Swappable Power Supplies
Director’s two modular power supplies provide fault tolerance: If one power supply loses power, Director continues operating on the remaining supply. For maximum reliability, each supply has its own integrated cooling fan. If a power supply module needs replacement, there is no need to take Director offline because the power supplies are hot-swappable. Both universal AC and -48VDC (telco) models are available.

Security and Reliability
Director is a secure and reliable appliance that delivers unsurpassed monitoring access flexibility. It handles network traffic entirely in hardware, so there is no software to be loaded, maintained, or compromised. Configuration variables and TapFlow filters can be changed only through the device’s management port, so your monitoring access is immune to viruses, worms, and other attacks that pass through the Director network ports. Director maintains its configuration and TapFlow filters even when power is absent, making it a truly unstoppable appliance. In addition, when Director is powered off, traffic flows are not impeded between the device’s in-line network ports, maximizing network uptime even when Director is offline.

Doing Our Part
Net Optics is dedicated to ensuring user safety and developing products that are increasingly environmentally friendly. Director adheres to UL and CE safety certifications; FCC, VCCI, and C-Tick EMC certifications; and RoHS and WEEE environmental certifications.