Demand for More Bandwidth is Driving Growth of Network Access and Monitoring Technologies

Scaling such tools to 10G speeds to ensure network access is at times easier said than done. Often times, the performance of monitoring tools cannot be scaled, and performance requirements should not take precedence over security effectiveness. Instead, both high performance and effective security are essential.

To provide this proper approach and ensure network access, the proven method is load balancing. This then-understood research has been used in the past to distribute transactions across pools of servers and to create link-aggregation groups that are able to utilize parallel WAN links to increase overall bandwidth. Load balancing extends this concept, even though it does present different requirements.

Method to monitor

One industry that has deployed load balancing as a method to monitor and manage the performance and security of the network is the call center industry. Many call centers record calls and most of these calls and recordings are done digitally. Network traffic recorders are used to record the calls and as the volume of calls increases, the load may reach a level that outstrips the capacity of the single traffic recorder.

A load balancing solution is often put in place to deploy multiple traffic recorders that operate in parallel. This approach will capture all calls as long as for each call, the entire conversation winds up on the same traffic recorder, and that the call setup traffic must be available on the recorder for all the calls on that recorder.

In order to assure network access to all viable players, there are a few critical components that must be in place. First, there must be flow coherency of the traffic. Second, the solution must be able to accommodate different definitions of flows. Fourth, the monitoring must include aggregation, redirection and regeneration capabilities. And, all things considered, there must be filtering to select traffic of interest so effective monitoring can take place.