Gigamon Approaches Big Data from a New Angle

Gigamon (News - Alert) is telling its big data story this week at Mobile World Congress, and that story has a significantly different plot line than those of others in the industry, says Andy Huckridge (News - Alert).

“There’s a new way to solve monitoring for big data,” he says.

Rather than analyzing ever bit of traffic in every pipe, which would require a large and growing investment in costly analysis tools by service providers, Gigamon suggests that carriers can get a representative sample of traffic on their pipes, and analyze just that information.

Less data to analyze equals lower processing requirements and the need for fewer analysis tools, he says. And that equals lower costs for service providers.

“This is a new concept, we don’t think anyone is working in this direction,” says Huckridge.

Gigamon is currently collaborating with a tier 1 U.S. carrier on a proof of concept around this. They’re working together to characterize data and figure out how much data you can remove and still make it representative of that data.

“We’re certainly not saying this is going to work out of the gate, there are going to be teething issues,” says Huckridge.

The company is not yet certain when it will productize this concept, but Huckridge suggests it could be toward the end of this year. The offering will be available as a software addition to Gigamon’s existing products.

Gigamon sells an intelligent traffic visibility appliance called GigaVUE, and it recently added GigaPORT-C01 100Gb and GigaPORT-Q08 40Gb line cards to the GigaVUE H Series product line. Huckridge adds that Gigamon also can connect its nodes across the network to allow for much higher processing capabilities. The above, he says, enables Gigamon to deliver on volume, port density, and scale.