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July 20, 2010

Gigamon Tapped for Large Insurance Company Network Monitoring Job

By David Sims, TMCnet Contributing Editor


An investment and insurance company based in the United States, which maintains a large network requiring constant monitoring for security, performance, and capacity, had deployed some network monitoring tools, including multiple instances of some tools to load-share traffic from higher-speed links.

In some cases, one tool needed to see traffic from multiple TAPs and, in other cases, multiple tools needed to see traffic from a single TAP. Over time the number of monitoring tools grew, and eventually, the network and monitoring requirements expanded beyond the capabilities of the existing matrix switch: “There was simply no way to connect all the TAP points to the tools,” company officials said.

So the firm chose the GigaVUE data access switch from Gigamon (News - Alert), which streamlines the deployment and use of multiple network monitoring tools in data center networks, providing aggregation, replication, and filtering of critical network traffic, as well as full network visibility to all categories of passive monitoring tools.

Today the firm has 18 tools that monitor nine full-duplex links. The tools include two from Vontu, three from QRadar, three from Niksun, four Intrusion (News - Alert) Detection Systems, and two Sniffers. They also have traffic recorders for forensics and troubleshooting, a Resource Usage Monitor probe for customer experience, and Tealeaf for Web experience monitoring, all connected through the GigaVUE.

Company executives say they like GigaVUE’s stackable chassis, which gives them “nearly unlimited scalability, eliminating the port contention from mirrored or span ports when multiple tool connections are required. This was a key capability that had constrained the previous switch.”

GigaVUE’s aggregation capabilities also allow it to retrieve data from several high-speed connections simultaneously and deliver specific traffic to a variety of centralized tools.

Company officials say even shopping cart troubleshooting , which poses a serious security risk as well as a compliance issue, is addressed: “GigaVUE provides a secure product that confines tools to a centralized location with controlled access.”


David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.

Edited by Erin Monda