Gigamon Leapfrogs Itself, announcing the GigaVUE® 2404 High Density Data Access Switch For 10G Networks

Scalable Monitoring Switch Provides Twenty Four 10GigE Ports and Four 1GigE Ports per chassis, expandable to over 200 x 1/10 GbE ports

Silicon Valley, CA - September 16, 2008 - Gigamon, the leading provider of intelligent data access networking products, today announced its third generation GigaVUE® 2404 high density data access switch, a uniquely powerful monitoring infrastructure solution for today’s ultra-fast 10 GigE networks. Featuring twenty-four 10 GbE ports and four 1 GigE ports, in a low profile 2U chassis, the GigaVUE-2404 is a high performance implementation of Gigamon’s Data Access Network (DAN) technology—a total solution for today’s complex network monitoring challenges.

Housed in a 2U chassis, the GigaVUE-2404 offers the most advanced aggregating, replicating, mapping and packet filtering capabilities of any data access switch on the market. DAN technology ensures that monitoring tools can be deployed immediately without impact to the network and can see traffic from the entire network, even across parallel or mesh topologies. Legacy 1 Gpbs tools can be used to monitor newly installed 10 GigE links using DAN Any to Any technology

The GigVUE-2404’s modular design allows network managers to deploy the exact number of ports necessary to accomplish the specific goals, no more, no less. The modular design begins with a minimum of 4 ports and scales to a maximum of over 300 ports.

Gigamon’s Data Access Network technology is a breakthrough for network engineers dealing with the increased number and variety of tools for intrusion detection, SOX compliance, forensic recording, VoIP analysis and the like. Gigamon’s DAN-equipped switches are packet-aware, meaning they can provide exactly the packets needed for a given tool to carry out its function. By virtue of their out –of-band connection, they can also do so without impacting network operations.

“Any Ethernet-based passive monitoring tool can be connected to the GigaVUE-2404 with complete assurances it will operate at peak efficiency,” said Patrick Leong, chief technical officer for Gigamon. “The GigaVUE-2404 not only resolves the problem of too few TAP or SPAN ports, but also enables users to plug in an IDS, DPI, analyzer, sniffer or other passive security or monitoring tool without ever worrying about impact to the production network.”
The GigaVUE-2404’s secure, customizable “data socket” orientation allows users to divide traffic and distribute packets to different 1 GigE or 10 GigE tools according to a variety of power and flexible map and filter rules:

•Any-to-Any Connectivity to solve all tool deployment problems

•Aggregate Multiple Links to reduce monitoring expense, by consolidating tools

•Multicast to Multiple Tools to share data sources across different tools

•Intelligently Filter and Divide Loads to customize and manage data to different tools

With the GigaVUE-2404 engineers can isolate and capture sessions across parallel links and switches, reducing and customizing data flows to each tool as needed. Adding flexibility to the GigaVUE-2404’s configuration options is its hot-swappable, three-blade architecture. The base chassis houses eight 10GigE ports and four 1GigE ports as well as the CPU, a 244 Gbps full-duplex switching capacity forwarding engine with serial and Ethernet management ports.

Optional second and third slot blades each have eight 10 GigE ports available in two flavors: GigaPORT and GigaTAP. GigaPORT blades ports are commonly used to receive traffic from SPAN ports or taps and to send traffic to passive monitoring tools. GigaTAP blades have four full-duplex 10GigE TAPs and can simultaneously tap up to 4 different 10 Gbps links per blade.

Each of the GigaVUE-2404’s 10GigE ports has a SFP+ form factor, offering a choice of optical or copper port options and 10GigE or 1GigE speeds. In addition, each 10GigE port can be configured to step down as a 1GigE port. 1GigE ports, if running copper, can support 10/100/1000 Mbps line speeds. This provides major migration flexibility for customers transforming from 100Mbps and 1Gbps line speeds to a network with 10GigE links.

Multiple GigaVUE-2404 data access switches can be stacked together or with existing GigaVUE-MP or GigaVUE-420 chassis into a much bigger virtual GigaVUE fabric of over 200 ports, running in either a master-slave or star configuration. GigaVUE-2404 switches are designed for compatibility with traffic coming from either of Gigamon’s other prior generation data access switches—the GigaVUE 420 or the GigaVUE-MP.

About Gigamon
Gigamon is the inventor and leading provider of Data-Access Switches. Its flagship product, GigaVUE®, can multicast packets from one span or tap to many tools to solve the span port sharing problem. It also can aggregate and intelligently filter packets from many spans or taps to one or multiple tools to solve the problem of monitoring flows across complex mesh topologies and virtual networks. GigaVUE® facilitates unobtrusive parallel tool deployment with network-wide coverage, significantly reducing customers’ capital budgets and yielding immediate ROI benefits.

For more information about Gigamon Data Access Switches please contact us here.