Ultimately this is one of the things that SDN schemes such as OpenFlow bring a data center for free. Distributed flow statistics collection through OenFlow's extensible infrastructure gives you a huge range of reporting and analysis capabilities, with no taps needed. Every network port is in essence a tap. Here's an interesting paper on one open source OF tool: https://www.nas.ewi.tudelft.nl/people/Fernando/papers/MonitoringOpenFlow.pdf -mel beckman
On Jun 21, 2015, at 9:50 PM, Mitch Howards <hbf9121@hotmail.com> wrote:
Hello All,
Was wondering what folks are using to monitor traffic on their networks. Looking into Ixia and APCON devices for dedup and other filtering features as well as passive fiber TAPs to capture the traffic.
How are folks handling TAP'ing large data center networks? TAPs at the "distribution layer" would be the best fit for my network but that would require a ton of passive fiber TAPs for the incoming fibers to the distribution switches. The end goal is to not only capture the north-south traffic on the network but also east-west traffic. It seems more efficient to just use SPANs but there are many limitations using SPANs.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
Mitch