One of the major issues that IT organizations have with any form of external cloud computing is that they don’t have much visibility into what is occurring within any of those environments. To help address that specific issue, Ixia created its Net Tool Optimizer, which makes use of virtual and physical taps to provide visibility into cloud computing environments. Now via the latest upgrade to that software, Ixia is providing support for both virtual and physical networks while doubling the numbe...

Flexible, Fail-Safe Inline Security Boosts Agility, Availability, and Resilience While Reducing Network Costs As networks deliver more services and carry ever-higher volumes of multiprotocol traffic, data rates continue to soar. Voice, data, and streaming video now travel on one wire, raising security and compliance issues. Today’s intense threat landscape demands multiple proactive security systems throughout the network for a strong, layered security posture. These proactive devices include fi...

Blind spots are a long-established threat to virtual data centers. They are inherent to virtual machine (VM) usage and technology due to the nature of VMs, lack of visibility for inter- and intra-VM data monitoring, the typical practices around the use of VM’s, and the use of multiple hypervisors in enterprise environments. Virtual machines by their nature hide inter- and intra-VM traffic. This is because the traffic stays within in a very small geographic area. As I mentioned in a previous blog...

Delivers industry’s first visibility solution that includes stateful SSL decryption to improve application performance and security forensics Ixia (Nasdaq: XXIA), a leading provider of application performance and security resilience solutions, announced it has extended its Application and Threat Intelligence (ATI) Processor™ to include stateful, bi-directional SSL decryption capability for application monitoring and security analytics tools. Stateful SSL decryption provides complete session info...

Visibility. Network visibility. Simple terms that are thrown around quite a bit today. But the reality isn’t quite so simple. Why? Scale for one. It’s simple to maintain visibility for a small network. But large corporate or enterprise networks? That’s another story altogether. Visibility solutions for these large networks have to scale from one end of the network to the other end – from the campus and branch office edge to the data center and/or private cloud. Managing and troubleshooting perfo...

Ixia is proud to announce that we are expanding one of the key capabilities in Ixia xStream platforms, “Double Your Ports,” to our Net Tool Optimizers (NTO) family of products. As of our 4.3 release, this capability to double the number of network and monitor inputs is now available on the NTO platform. If you are not familiar with Double Your Ports, it is a feature that allows you to add additional network or tool ports to your existing NTO by allowing different devices to share a single port. ...

Proper access is the core component of any visibility architecture—you need to be able to capture the data before you can properly analyze it. To further help our customers, Ixia has released a new regenerator tap for copper networks. Regeneration means you get the same clean copy of incoming data distributed to multiple output ports in real time. The Ixia Net Optics Regeneration Taps solve the key physical layer challenges of multi-device monitoring for 10, 100, and 1000MB (1 GbE) copper networ...

In the three previous blogs in this series, I answered an often asked customer question – “What can really be done to improve network visibility?” – with discussions on data and packet conditioning, advanced filtering, and automated data center capability. In the fourth part of this blog series, I’ll reveal another set of features that can further improve network visibility and deliver even more verifiable benefits. Too quickly summarize, this multi-part blog covers an in-depth view of various f...

Imagine what would happen if the governor of one state got to change all the laws for the whole country for a day, without the other states or territories ever knowing about it. And then the next day, another governor gets to do the same. And then another. Such foreseeable chaos is precisely what happens when multiple IT or security administrators define traffic filtering policies without some overarching intelligence keeping tabs on who’s doing what. Each user acts from their own unique perspec...

An important factor in improving network visibility is the ability to pass the correct data to monitoring tools. Otherwise, it becomes very expensive and aggravating for most enterprises to sift through the enormous amounts of data packets being transmitted (now and in the near future). Bandwidth requirements are projected to continue increasing for the foreseeable future – so you may want to prepare now. As your bandwidth needs increase, complexity increases due to more equipment being added to...

I was recently reading an article in TechCrunch titled “The Problem With The Internet Of Things,” where the author lamented how bad design or rollout of good ideas can kill promising markets. In his example, he discussed how turning on the lights in a room, through the Internet of Things (IoT), became a five step process rather than the simple one step process we currently use (the light switch). This illustrates the problem between the grand idea, and the practicality of the market: it’s awesom...

Trying to detect intrusions in your network and extracting data from your network is a tricky business. Deep insight requires a deep understanding of the context of your network traffic—where are connections coming from, where are they going, and what are the specific applications in use. Without this breadth of insight, you can’t take action to stop and remediate attacks, especially from Advanced Persistent Threats (APT). To see how Ixia helps its customers gain this actionable insight into the...

Maximizing the Value and Resiliency of Your Deployed Enterprise Security Solution with Intelligent Load Balancing Correctly implementing your security solution in the presence of complex, high-volume user traffic has always been a difficult challenge for network architects. The data in transit on your network originates from many places and fluctuates with respect to data rates, complexity, and the occurrence of malicious events. Internal users create vastly different network traffic than extern...

When chasing security or performance issues in a data center, the last thing you need is packet loss in your visibility fabric. In this blog post I will focus on the importance of how to deal with multiple tools with different but overlapping needs. Dealing with overlapping filters is critical, in both small and large visibility fabrics. Lost packets occur when filter overlaps are not properly considered. Ixia’s NTO is the only visibility platform that dynamically deals with all overlaps to ensu...

As IT departments see the increasing value of network monitoring, sometimes there is confusion as to how to deploy monitoring switches – from an organizational point of view. There are two common deployment scenarios. The first is where the IT operations department owns the network monitoring switch, also known as a network packet broker (NPB). This group then centralizes control and access to the NPB so that multiple IT groups can use the same NPB. The second is where the core networking group ...

Ixia (Nasdaq: XXIA), a leading provider of application performance and security resilience solutions, announced global survey results demonstrating that while most companies believe virtualization technology is a strategic priority, there are clear risks that need to be addressed. Ixia surveyed more than 430 targeted respondents in South and North America (50 percent), APAC (26 percent) and EMEA (24 percent). The accompanying report titled, The State of Virtualization for Visibility Architecture...

I was recently at a conference where the topic of network security came up again, like it always does. It seems like there might be a little more attention on it now, not really due to the number of breaches—although that plays into a little—but more because companies are being held accountable for allowing the breaches. Examples include Target (where both the CIO and CEO got fired over that breach in 2013) and the fact that the FCC and FTC are fining companies (like YourTel America, TerraCom, P...

We work with majority the top carriers worldwide, as well as many of their largest customers and the companies who provide infrastructure technology for their networks. We’re the “application performance and security resilience” company – we help you make sure technology works the way you expect it to out of the gate, and keeps on doing it throughout the deployment lifecycle. Today’s mobile subscribers are what we call “tough customers”: they expect instant availability and high performance, all...

Visibility Is an Urgent Challenge Lack of visibility is behind the worst of IT headaches, leaving the network open to malicious intrusions, as well as compliance, availability, and performance problems. Today’s soaring traffic volumes are bringing greater complexity, proliferating apps and devices, and rising virtual traffic—in fact, “east-west” traffic between virtual machines now makes up half of all traffic on the network. Virtual traffic is the culprit that spawns unmonitored "blind spots," ...

Ixia is announcing support for OpenFlow SDN in Ixia’s ControlTower architecture. Our best-in-breed Visibility Architecture now extends data center visibility by taking advantage of a plethora of qualified OpenFlow hardware. ControlTower is our innovative platform for distributed visibility launched nearly two years ago. This solution manages a cluster of our Net Tool Optimizers (NTOs) as if you were managing a single logical NTO. At the time of its launch, we leveraged Software Defined Networkin...