Gigamon Community Member Spotlight: Jeffrey Hunter

Welcome to our first Gigamon Community Member Spotlight, a new regular feature in which we get to know important members of the Gigamon Community.

Today we’re meeting Jeffrey Hunter, owner and director of DevOps at Foxtrot Division, a consulting outfit that provides software and cyber systems engineering expertise on several U.S. government contracts.

Visibility into AWS

“There’s four of us and for our work we help to integrate the Gigamon platform’s GigaVUE-HC2 visibility nodes into customers’ physical, virtual and cloud network infrastructures to provide cyber defense, as well as teaching them how to use it.”

Jeffrey says their customer uses AWS extensively because of its ability to scale flexibly and its storage and compute options. “They have 14 VPC Network Enclaves with about 4,000 instances of EC2 running in AWS. The vast majority of their data lives there,” he says. “So to deliver on their security requirements, we have to have visibility of every transaction.”

In an analogy, Jeffrey likens them to CCTV camera systems that capture everything on the network and can then deliver that data to other tools for detailed analysis.

“We tried other solutions, but they haven’t been able to capture all the traffic as fast as you need to capture it and deliver it as fast as you need to deliver it,” says Jeffrey. “[Gigamon has really excelled at] being able to see all the traffic, capture it and deliver it effectively, without losing anything.”

Capturing NetFlow

Jeffrey also places great importance on the Gigamon Visibility Platform’s ability to capture NetFlow information. “NetFlow is like a phone bill: It looks at the network data and creates a record  showing what IP is talking to what IP, when, for how long,” he says. ”It’s very effective for cyber defense and it’s a huge plus for us that Gigamon allows us to do that on a single platform.”

Send the Right Data to the Right Tools — and Nothing Else

Jeffrey notes that Gigamon deduplication abilities are another key value-add, which makes it easy to prevent duplicate data from taking up excessive storage and bogging down security-tool bandwidth. For Foxtrot Division this includes popular security tools like Splunk, Firepower and the open-source packet-indexing tool Moloch.

Getting Help from the Community

As with any IT project, sometimes Jeffrey and his team have questions and that’s when he turns to the Gigamon Community for help. In fact, he’s currently one of the most active users on the forums, having amassed well over 200 points from asking technical questions and assisting others with theirs.

“The forums have been a value-added resource, allowing us to tap into the wider Gigamon community, and answer the tough ‘what-do-you-think-about-this-problem’ questions,” says Jeffrey. “The things you can’t get in the docs but can be answered by the sweat and tears of those who have conquered the hard stuff.”

Much of his recent activity focuses on the challenges in working with cloud-based infrastructures.

“GigaVUE^® Cloud Suite — that’s where the community has helped the most. There’s not a whole lot of information out there because cloud is so new,” he says.

Coding in His Free Time

There’s more to life than work, though, and outside the governmental IT trenches Jeffrey likes to relax with some lower-pressure coding and writing activities.

“I enjoy writing code and creating things…software development, doing websites, creating web applications,” says Jeffrey. “I used to write a lot, and software engineering is very much like writing: You’re writing in code rather than English, but it’s still definitely a creative endeavor.”

Thank you to Jeffrey for talking to us for this inaugural profile! And of course, if you’ve got tough technical questions or some hard-won expertise to share yourself, come interact with Jeffrey and hundreds of other Gigamon experts on the Gigamon Community website — guidelines for joining are right here. Until next time.