Taps and Aggregator Solutions
Teraquant has a fine reputation for exceptional customer value and is a highly recognized SIP specialist. We provide cost effective IP telephony and networking infrastructure for UC services and always with advanced real-time network monitoring built-in. To keep your network running 24/7 by monitoring real-time and capturing every packet at line rate, without errors under heavy traffic loads, Teraquant integrates Garland Technologies Network Taps and Aggregators with our service assurance solutions.
Network Taps and Aggregators
Typically, monitoring of a full duplex link requires squashing 2 data flows from opposite directions, both side of the duplex link [east to west and west to east streams] into one SPAN port or mirroring port on the switch or router. After multiple flows are squashed into one physical span port, This causes collisions and dropped packets. Not all packets reach the monitoring tool resulting in erroneous measurements and analysis. For example, this means when monitoring SIP/VoIP networks, which would result in a poor MOS/voice quality measurement in a case where there is no bad packet loss on the live network and no bad user experience. A network operator is then left chasing ghosts, errors that are not real, don’t exist and not a problem to users.
Benefits of Tap Aggregators
Tap aggregators provide many benefits. The insertion of a Tap either fiber optic or copper, ensures every packet is captured at line rate with zero packet loss. The tap feeds to the Aggregator, both which operate in “failsafe modes” where optical switches /relays allow the traffic to continue flowing despite power outage or in case the device ever suffers from systematic failure. The Aggregators are utilized to unite the traffic into one or multiple traffic streams, to filter, merge, aggregate and fans-out the traffic to your monitoring devices ensuring that only the flows required are dispensed to each monitor and no packet is ever lost. Garland Technologies taps and aggregators support speeds up to 100Gbps.
Taps and aggregators therefore save you expensive extra switches and routers to support the SPAN ports, management overhead, continuous support costs to monitor over utilization and ensure you can right size your monitoring tools, ensuring they are never overloaded.
Types of Tap Aggregators
Copper and Fiber taps in particular can never be compromised owing to absence of a management port. They are also easy to install with a simple ‘plug and play’ setup. The aggregators have a display (front panel) that makes it possible to monitor real time data. For maximum flexibility, they also have a CLI (if required) and a web GUI for easy set up and come pre-loaded with common port mappings. They show utilization of network links which in comparison to higher end tools, have a lower cost.
Enabling Comprehensive VoIP Analytics across Public/Private Cloud Environments
When efficiently managing a voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) telephony environment, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) monitoring system is essential for delivering excellent service quality and 5×9’s up-time. Garland Technology and Teraquant Oracle SIP Service Assurance solution delivers 100% packet-level visibility eliminating voice, video, and UC service blind spots across the network at the lowest operational costs. By partnering together, they help spot performance degradation and drill down the root cause of security threats and service problems, reducing trouble ticket resolution time by 66%.
Service Assurance combines troubleshooting with proactive performance monitoring including alert and trap generation. Oracle’s OCOM is the preferred platform for troubleshooting and maintenance for real-time services. Delivering total visibility across your entire network, OCOM from Teraquant provides a complete solution for SIP Service Assurance. The solution isolates all call connection and quality issues and saves you from sudden bursts of international fraud or stealth under the radar fraudulent revenue leakage, inbound robocalls, and domestic traffic pumping.
By saving all historical calls, issues are already captured and can be isolated in seconds. What used to take IT professionals 1-2 hours to analyze in wait time for resolution and strain on network security, now solves in 1-2 minutes and manages performance proactively. The combined Garland/Teraquant solution optimizes operational efficiency, requires no CAPEX, and shows OPEX profit in the first month.
The capabilities and comprehensive features include filtering, aggregation, packet-slicing, inline traffic by-pass, and load balancing. Fully modular and flexible Network Packet and TAP Broker solutions which are tailored to fulfill the requirements of your network. It allows for solutions that enable managing, protecting, and monitoring your network more cost effective and easy. This centralizes and improves efficiency and ROI of the network across the monitoring and security infrastructures.
Security Applications of Network Taps
TAPs are regarded as basis of Secure visibility, enabling intrusion detection systems (IDS) and security monitor platforms to work without compromise and maintaining total visibility across the network. Security is assured as the tap is a dedicated device and feeds to dedicated monitoring devices only. a fiber optic tap is a simple piece of glass and cannot be hacked. Removal will be instantly noticeable.
Customer Premise Deployment
How It Works
- The Garland Technology network TAPs are deployed in on-premise locations feeding into the Garland Technology PacketMAX packet broker.
- Teraquant configures the Garland Technologies aggregator with required filters and aggregation as required by a customer.
- The Garland deployment routes filtered and load-balanced IP packets to the Teraquant packet capture probe, where the customer logs into the Mediation Engine to use the Teraquant SIP service assurance dashboard.
- Teraquant SIP service assurance delivers KPI reporting, decryption analysis, and big data analytics applications that are reported on customers’ common off-the-shelf servers (COTS.)
Is your cloud provider safe?
According to a Ponemon Institute report, the Global Cloud Data Security Study, companies are not doing a very good job of securing the confidential information stored in the cloud. Respondents included IT professionals from around the world. Over half believed that their companies did not employ a proactive approach to compliance with privacy and data security regulations in a cloud environment. Most of the respondents (56%) also believed that their companies were not as careful with private customer information stored in the cloud. Some general recommendations noted in the report are for companies to make broader use of encryption when data is stored in the cloud. Further, comprehensive policies should be developed that govern what information should and should not be stored in the cloud. Finally, continuous monitoring and security measures should be implemented by the company and the cloud service provider. Cloud providers are offering enterprise monitoring services in IaaS environments with a goal of allowing more management control to the client company.
Comprehensive monitoring services require access and visibility to data flows in a network.
In order to establish a monitoring program that includes network analysis, application performance and acceleration, intrusion prevention, data loss protection, encryption/decryption offloading and other specialized services, numerous appliances may be required. Taps and Aggregators give access to the network traffic and help enterprise networks and cloud service providers manage the panoply of appliances that are required for robust monitoring.
Taps and Aggregators provide the physical access at port level required for connections into monitoring appliances but that is only the beginning. Intelligent features like filtering and port mapping ensure that the right information is sent to the right appliance. Access ports are protected from unauthorized access and fail-over features help maintain network operation when appliances lose power or are out of service. Taps and Aggregators also allow safe removal of redundant data through Deduplication. Not all traffic that flows through a Network Packet Broker or Aggregators is useful – some data may be duplicated. To save time and processing power, duplicate packets and other redundant data can be removed before reaching monitoring and security tools. During this process it’s imperative that relevant original data isn’t accidentally dropped. Additionally, having a network TAP working alongside your Packet Broker provides the first layer of network visibility. So in 2017, The Rolling Stones might now be singing, “Hey! You! Get on my cloud” – but only if they have good access traffic control implemented, as well as good security.
Public/Private and Hybrid Cloud Deployment Use Case
How It Works
- In a public cloud deployment, customers need access to data from both on-premise data and public cloud workloads like Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, or VMWare/Private cloud environments.
- The Garland network TAP feeds from physical data center environments and the Garland Prism traffic mirroring provides packet-level data via GRE or VxLAN tunneling to hybrid deployments.
- The data mirrored from the on-premise or virtual TAP is delivered and aggregated via PacketMAX Advanced Aggregator.
- The Garland deployment routes filtered and load-balanced IP packets to the Teraquant packet capture probe, where the customer logs into the applications server to use the Teraquant SIP assurance dashboard.
IT Operations and Sec Ops Team Benefits
- Provide rapid troubleshooting of IP telephony problems, according to our customers, “what used to take us two hours to troubleshoot, now takes us less than 2 minutes.”
- Ensures real-time trending, graphing, and alerts of performance threshold violations.
- Gain full control of the network with dashboards for every aspect and dimension of an IP telephony service.
- Gain full control over traffic behavior with advanced traffic aggregation, load balancing, and filtering.
- Reliable zero-loss packet processing.
- Filter duplicated packets optimizing resource consumption, throughput, and storage capacity.
Integration Benefits
The Teraquant SIP solution and Garland Technology provides unique visibility to customers in the public and private cloud that can be quickly implemented. Using readily available and industry-standard protocols, this partnership’s proven interoperability has been scaling millions of complex hybrid environments, increasing ROI, and overall saving 37% on operational support costs. IT operations and Security Ops teams gain industry-leading accurate analytics for VoIP environments.