Case Studies
Overview
Most government agency data centers in the United States are policy driven with procedures in place for monitoring everything occurring within each center. Many are now highly virtualized, and while the information technology (IT) teams recognize that visibility gaps exist, many are not aware of a solution. The Keysight account team introduced this large federal agency to Keysight’s integrated virtualized visibility platform, which maximized monitoring effectiveness by ensuring proper access to the data the customer needed, when and where it needs it.
The customer IT team maintains a high level of visibility into physical networks by using numerous security, forensics, and application performance monitoring tools to perform extensive inspection. With most servers deployed as virtual machines (VMs) in a VMware stack, it recognized the visibility gap created by east–west traffic flowing between VMs. The customer recognized the need for a more reliable and holistic view of the network, traffic flows, and problem points. It decided to expand beyond basic virtual data access via native port mirroring and debugging by implementing an endto-end visibility architecture that uses virtual taps (vTaps) for access, and network packet brokers (NPBs) to bolster security, simplify management/configuration, and improve the efficiency of its monitoring tools.
Moving to a fully virtualized data center, the customer had significant blind spots for east–west traffic between application and web service tiers running on the same host. Normal port mirroring offered by VMware ESXi did not work as the customer encountered multiple technical issues:
The Keysight Solution
What made Keysight’s intelligent visibility platform especially powerful and best suited for this customer was the combination of vTaps and Vision ONE’s intelligent packet processing capabilities. Together, these functions enabled packet and application data manipulation; NetFlow generation with advanced application identification and geographic location; secure sockets layer (SSL) decryption, load balancing; and many advanced packet processing capabilities, like deduplication, header stripping, and fragmentation. Examples include filtering at the application level, the generation of NetFlow data, SSL decryption, the generation of geo-location of users and devices, and the capture of browser information. The solution provides unprecedented insight into network traffic in both physical and virtualized multi-tenant environments.
Additionally, the customer recognized the following features of Keysight’s vTaps as essential to implementing pervasive end-to-end visibility in its environment:
After trying out 100 vTaps, the customer recognized Keysight’s visibility solution benefits and is preparing to roll it out across all seven of its data centers. This will result in the deployment of several thousand vTaps and numerous NPBs throughout the network.
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