Overlapping Flow Samples, New Capabilities Inside Gigamon’s FlowVUE Feature

A few years ago, Gigamon introduced FlowVUE^®. It was our first foray into traffic scaling technology and a means to help service providers solve the cost headaches associated with big data. Jointly developed with a leading U.S. telecommunications company, the concept was to scale traffic to meet the existing ingress and traffic-throughput processing rates of attached analytic tools rather than incur the costs associated with the growing tool rail. FlowVUE managed the processing of exponential traffic generated by the smart-handset era.

Since then, we’ve seen a tremendous advance in “subscriber-aware” technologies that can deliver targeted populations on a subscriber-by-subscriber basis, as opposed to monitoring an entire pipe and all the traffic within. See “Leading Service Provider Gains Big Savings and Clear Business Advantage” case study.

‎In collaboration with several global carriers, we have taken the original FlowVUE feature several steps forward with new functionality that allows operators to get a much clearer understanding of their subscriber behaviors, traffic, usage, and more.

As an industry first, this unique capability—which can correlate data across‎ subscribers, devices, and traffic types—allows carriers to pinpoint complex, multi-factor problem scenarios and respond with appropriate actions more accurately.

The advantages of traffic scaling with overlapping flow sampling include:

• Eliminate the need for multiple licenses for the same feature from multiple different vendors
• Optimize analytic tool processing bandwidth
• Drive all the tools on the tool rail with optimum throughput
• Deliver targeted‎ populations of devices, subscribers, or traffic to the tool rail
• Deliver overlapping traffic samples to multiple different tools
• Load balance traffic across the connected tools in a session-aware manner
• Solve the big data problem and save capex
• Solve over and under subscription of the tools and even out busy-hour variance
• Gain visibility across the network to better understand security issues
• Improve‎ accuracy/precision as the tools now see the same underlying traffic
• Improve operational and business intelligence use of tools
• Reduce cost by getting more from existing tools. Rather than scaling tools to fit ever-increasing traffic, operators can now scale traffic to fit existing tools.

For the first time, operators have everything they need to fully and completely drive a unified tool rail comprised of application performance management (APM), network performance management (NPM), customer experience management (CEM), and security tools. With the newly enhanced FlowVUE feature, they can:

• Drive a tool rail with traffic from all over the network and find problems faster
• Scale the traffic, not the tools, to meet the processing throughputs of existing tools
• Gain operational advantages by pre-processing the traffic to increase result accuracy and precision; reduce the number of licenses needed; and increase analytic tool traffic-processing throughput
• Eliminate the need for external load balancers with session-aware load balancing
• Deliver multiple, overlapping sampling pools to drive each tool independently, with the correct type and rate of scaled traffic
• Drive security tools as part of a unified tool rail eliminating previously siloed security tools working independently

The complete and unified tool rail provides incredible opportunities for carriers to differentiate themselves by offering advanced new services, driven by functions that this new insight enables, and benefits gained from a series of new operational efficiencies.