Power & Versatility for any Enterprise
The Omnia series leverages Cubro’s experience in Network Visibility and Monitoring, creating a lineup of purpose-driven hardware paired with software feature stacks developed over years of engineering. This approach offers customers greater choice, more functionality, and flexibility to tailor features to a specific need. The different products in Omnia Series include the Omnia10 (earlier known as EXA8) and expands on the hardware capabilities with the Omnia20 and Omnia120 featuring higher port density, ports speeds, and performance.
Each piece of hardware is designed to incorporate features from Cubro’s PacketMaster and SessionMaster feature stacks, functions coming direct from Cubro’s line of network packet brokers and advanced, next-gen packet brokers, respectively. Omnia also introduces the AppMaster feature stack, a full-featured Ubuntu Linux operating system allowing users to run additional applications. These applications come from a diverse ecosystem including applications developed by Cubro, our AppMaster partners, and packages from the Linux open-source community.
Explore Omnia Feature Stacks
PacketMaster
The PacketMaster feature stack incorporates all the functions a user would expect to find in a classic Network Packet Broker and indeed, owes its foundation to Cubro’s Packetmaster line of products. The PacketMaster stack is focused on traffic aggregation, replication, and OSI Layer 2 through 4 filtering and modification. This includes functions such as Any to Many or Many to Any traffic forwarding, filtering, and blocking, header modification and stripping, Session-Aware Load-Balancing, tunnel termination and more. For more information see the complete PacketMaster feature list.
SessionMaster
The SessionMaster feature stack draws on Cubro’s cutting-edge Advanced Network Packet Broker designs and handles traffic at OSI Layer 5 and beyond. Functions include Traffic Deduplication, Keyword search, Data Masking and more. In today’s networks, it is no longer sufficient to filter traffic at L2-4 in many scenarios. SessionMaster features grant the deep visibility necessary for cutting-edge deployments. For more information see the complete SessionMaster feature list.
AppMaster
The AppMaster feature stack provides a full Linux environment to run applications from Cubro, our partners, as well as custom software, and various open-source projects. With access to traffic from the PacketMaster and SessionMaster stacks, the potential use cases are endless. AppMaster on the Omnia platform could potentially replace the functionality of an entire rack of appliances in a single unit.
PacketMaster Key Features
- ACL filtering inline
- Session-Aware Load Balancing
- GRE encapsulation
- ERSPAN termination
- VLAN and VXLAN termination
- GRE and VXLAN endpoint
- Tunnel header removal
- Timestamping
- Packet Slicing
- VLAN append/modify/strip (Q in Q support)
- MAC modification
- Custom Offset Header Stripping
SessionMaster Key Features
- ACL filtering inline
- Session-Aware Load Balancing
- GRE encapsulation
- ERSPAN termination
- Tunnel header removal
- Data masking
- TCP Reordering and Packet Fragment Reassembling
- Deduplication inline or on a SPAN port
- Deduplication passive after an optical TAP
- Netflow Generation
- Metadata exporter: Netflow / Netflow – DPI / DPI
- VXLAN VNI / inner IP / inner port filtering
AppMaster Key Features
- Rolling packet capture
- Cubro DPI analytics
- NTOPng by ntop
- HOMER and HEPIC by QXIP
Deployment Scenarios
The Omnia series can be utilized as a full-featured advanced network packet broker incorporating the functions of Cubro’s PacketMaster and SessionMaster feature stacks. Such functions include aggregation, traffic replication, filtering, header stripping, active tunnel termination, load-balancing, deduplication, and much more.
The Omnia series can generate NetFlow data enriched with protocol information from Cubro’s custom DPI engine. Ever-increasing amounts of encrypted network traffic has created a situation where IP address and port numbers are no longer sufficient for identifying traffic and what protocols are in use. Cubro’s DPI engine can identify 4000 different applications, even when they are ciphered, providing invaluable information to analytics, policy enforcement, and security tools.
The Omnia10/20 can capture traffic directly from tapped links or SPAN ports directly to disk. A rolling capture dashboard allows the user to navigate through the historical capture data and drill down to the traffic of interest using various filters and real-time feedback such as IP addresses, protocols, and ports present in the selected traffic. PCAP files can be extracted and downloaded for analysis or opened directly on the device using WebShark, a web-based protocol analyzer.
The Omnia10/20 support fail-safe tapping of up to four copper links. The traffic from these links can then be aggregated to the 10G interfaces for output to monitoring and security tools. Alternatively, the 1G copper interfaces can be used as inputs for traffic feeds from SPAN or Mirror ports or a combination of tapping and SPAN inputs. For easier analysis, it is possible to push VLAN tags per input port to identify the traffic’s ingress port.
Enhanced Visibility, Security & Monitoring Performance
Challenge
Today, an organization’s network is the foundation on which everything operates. It provides the vital pathways that interconnect all segments of the business and provides the conduits that allow the organization to communicate with the communities and individuals they serve. It is the mechanism that sustains the applications every business relies upon and the information highway that transports every bit of data vital to an enterprise, from R&D, testing, accounting, marketing, sales, order, fulfillment, and beyond.
Impact
There’s no doubt that networks, as well as the applications that they serve, are becoming increasingly complex, and this complexity enables productivity and operations at a scale that would seem unprecedented not long ago. Organizations have long known the need for visibility and monitoring within their networks; these are the only viable mechanisms by which they can ensure the optimal functioning of these business sustaining systems. They also enable the necessary safeguards to ensure the organization doesn’t fall prey to fraud, abuse, security breaches, and data loss that can severely interrupt the flow of business and cause irreparable reputation damage.
The increasing complexity of these networks also create more potential weakness and opportunities for malicious actors to gain a foothold and operate undetected.
Solution
To combat the new risks that accompany the growth and increasing complexity of our networks along with the advancement of technologies they support we continually add new security and monitoring appliances to inspect, detect, monitor, analyze, alert, prevent, enforce, and essentially do anything possible to maintain compliance and guard against malicious acts. An organization can quickly fill multiple racks with such appliances and, while they perform valuable roles, this also impacts budget, operational costs, and requires more support infrastructure like rack space, power, and cooling to operate.
The Omnia products are designed to help mitigate these issues by offering hardware appliances that are low power and efficient with rack space while also able to perform multiple functions, potentially reducing operational costs and conserving rack space. The Omnia does in two ways. First is the selection of hardware units that scale from extremely low-power, compact designs to a full 19” 1RU rack-mount unit. Second, is the ability to select from a diverse software ecosystem to tailor the unit to a specific use-case. This can range from a simple aggregation TAP, to a full-featured advanced network packet broker with the additional capabilities of producing Netflow data, DPI analytics, and hosting third-party applications to inspect and analyze traffic directly on the device.