Pervasive and intelligent network visibility

Q

Please can you give some background on Gigamon, as to
when and why it was formed and its progress to date?
A

Gigamon was founded in 2004 as we saw a need in the industry that was not being addressed, and we firmly believed that this need would become more intense and create more challenge over time. Our belief was proven to be correct as the growth in communications at the office and the residence around the globe have amplified the problems that are faced by owners and operators of networks everywhere. The problem that we address is a common issue: as the amount of network traffic increases significantly, and networks get faster and more pervasive, the management, monitoring and security systems that watch those networks cannot keep up. They are missing critical events, they are not seeing the boundary of the network, and they are overwhelmed with the volume of information coming at them. A new approach is required, and hence we founded the company and created our patented solution called the Visibility Fabric Architecture.
Since initial founding we have grown our solution and company and now serve 60% of the top 10 U.S. integrated and wireless telecommunication service providers.
Q
Who are the key personnel involved? And, when you
joined the company, what attracted you to the post?
A

I joined the company as I saw a unique and compelling answer to a challenge that I had personally experienced earlier in my career. Some years ago, I ran the network infrastructure for Netscape Communications – a company that, in its day, was pushing the boundaries of networking, communications and traffic distribution around the globe. I saw the challenge that Gigamon addressed, I understood the cost, risk and pain that occurred without the Gigamon Visibility Fabric Architecture , and hence I saw the potential to be part of something unique and exciting.
I joined in July 2011 as the Vice President of Marketing, and became the CEO in December 2012.
Our executive team and solution architects come from a broad cross-section of industry-leading companies from HP to Network General, and from Extreme Networks to Bluecoat.
Q
How does the recent IPO announcement impact on the
company?
A

The IPO was a major milestone in the continued evolution and development of our business. It represented a significant branding event, but it also established our market segment as being relevant in the eyes of the investment community. Ironically, many of the large banks, investment houses and trading environments use our Visibility Fabric within their environments, but the public offering elevated our company in the eyes of many in the public market.
However, now that the IPO is behind us, our primary focus remains on the efficient and effective running of our business. Our plan is to continue building upon the solution and technology that delivers intelligent visibility of network communications for our customers that now number over 1000.
Q
Gigamon has introduced the concept of Traffic Visibility
solutions – in brief, what are they and how do they differ
from what’s already available?
A
Before our Visibility Fabric Architecture was available, IT operations teams would proliferate monitoring and security tools across the network and connect those tools to the production network using “mirror ports” or network TAPs. As the size of the network continued to expand, organisations responded by deploying more tools creating higher costs and greater complexity.
With the arrival of forcing-factors such as ‘big data’, mobility, virtualisation and cloud computing, networks became significantly more complex and traditional approaches to monitor, manage and secure these new environments were unable to scale.
And so as previously mentioned, we developed an innovative solution that delivers pervasive, dynamic and intelligent visibility of traffic traversing production networks. Our solution, which we refer to as our Visibility Fabric architecture, consists of purpose-built appliances running our own GigaVUE software, enables an advanced level of visibility, in-flight enhancement, and control of network traffic. Our Fabric enables IT organisations to intelligently forward traffic from network and server infrastructure to management, monitoring, analysis, compliance and security tools in a manner that is optimised for the specific tool, use or function.
Q
Can you talk us through the recent announcement
concerning the company’s vision for software-defined
monitoring based on a four-layer architecture?
A

Our Unified Visibility Fabric architecture provides a pervasive solution that spans the world of physical, virtual and the emergent Software Defined Network. Our architecture is comprised of four layers that will deliver a centralised, programmable and unified monitoring infrastructure:
 A Services Layer
 A Management Layer
 An Orchestration Layer
 An Applications Layer
The Services Layer provides the intelligent filtering and forwarding capability (that we refer to as Flow Mapping®) along with a range of packet transformation capabilitites (GigaSMART®).
While the Sevices layer already serves the world of physical and virtual environments, we have demonstrated our proof-of-concept solution that extends this layer into the world of SDN.
The Management Layer consists of our pervasive managament solution, GigaVUE-FM (Fabric Manager) which provides centralised management and a common policy framework for multi-department and multi-tenant traffic monitoring and manipulation policies across the Visibility Fabric architecture. The Orchestration Layer is a forward-looking development that we intend to provide an open environment through a set of APIs to enable third party development of applications.
The Applications Layer provides a development platform to support a range of traffic transformation applications – some exist today, but we expect many more applications to be developed by both our own team as well as independent software.
Q
In more detail, what are the main limitations of existing network monitoring/management solutions?
A
Existing network monitoring/management solutions suffer from two major issues. Firstly, their ability to scale to new levels of network performance is limited and as the network moves from 1Gb to 10Gb and beyond, the monitoring/management solutions are unable to keep up and quickly become overwhelmed. Secondly, their deployment architecture to address the needs of larger and more diverse networks is costly and complex – multiple points-of-presence or probes to capture network traffic.
Q
How does the GigaVUE technology seek to overcome these?
A
Our Visibility Fabric solution applies intelligence to the challenge of ensuring that the right network traffic is delivered to the right monitoring and management tool at the appropriate time. That intelligence allows for the selection of relevant traffic from within a large stream of network packets to be selected and forwarded to the tool – and only that traffic. Any irrelevant and reduncant network traffic is discarded thereby ensuring that the most significant and important traffic on – for example – a 10Gb network connection is delivered to the 1Gb monitoring tool.
Q
There can be a problem trying to adapt technology developed
for physical networks to cope equally well with the virtual
layer – has Gigamon integrated the physical and virtual from
day one, or added virtual at a later date?
A
Our mission has always been to deliver pervasive visibilty across the network. As the market began to adopt virtualisation technologies and encountered visibility challenges as some traffic between virtual machines is switched locally within a physical host without traversing the physical switch, we created enhancements to our Fabric to address those challenges.
Previously, the exisiting monitoring and analysis tools were unable to see this inter-VM, and intra-host traffic. However, following the launch of our Fabric node for the virtual world – the GigaVUE-VM – network traffic within the virtualised infrastructure can be selected, forwarded and delivered to the appropriate monitoring, analysis or security devices.
Q
What are the main problems when trying to monitor and
manage physical and virtual networks?
A
The main issue is maintaining consistent enforcement of monitoring policies across various infrastructures. This is the reason for centralized management like the GigaVUE-FM Fabric Manager. When a change occurs in the production network, be it physical or virtual, the Visibility Fabric Architecture should be able to track that change and ensure visibility is retained for the attached monitoring tools.
Q
What is the extent of the network monitoring and management
offered by Gigamon, and how might this be developed further?
A

We’ve developed a range of Visibility Fabric nodes which provide pervasive visibility from the branch office to the data center and across physical, virtual and potentially SDN infrastructures. We’ll continue to develop solutions within the Unified Visibility Fabric architecture that offer orchestrated, centralised and policy-driven visibility.
Q
Crucially, how does the Gigamon technology integrate with
the whole IT infrastructure found within the data centre – both in
terms of the hardware and the software parts of the solution?
A

As users deploy next generation data centres there is the inexorable adoption of virtualisation. This is not only within servers but for networking and storage. The Gigamon Traffic Visibility Fabric architecture allows the managers to maintain or improve their capability to monitor what is happening within the infrastructure so allowing them to make the right decsiions.
Q
How does the Gigamon technology help end users trying to
come to grips with the Cloud?
A
The Unified Visibilty Fabric architecture will allow Cloud Service Providers to offer a range of service, including “Visibility as a Service” to their end-user customers. If enterprises are deploying workloads into the cloud, the cloud provider will be able to offer monitoring services for those workloads through the Unified Visibilty Fabric. Conversely, cloud providers are extending visibility of their customers’ existing tools into the public cloud space if the Visibility Fabric is being utilised in both of their data centers.
Q
What about Big Data?
A
Our solution provides a path to defer and delay the capital and operating costs associated with large-scale management and monitoring tool deployments. We can not only increase the effective throughput of tools, but we can decrease the rate at which network Big Data grows from a monitoring perspective. The solution allows organisations to continue using their existing lower speed tools for longer.
Through features such as filtering and de-duplication and forthcoming features such as FlowVUE (representative sampling of complete flows within a network link), the Big Data curve can be tamed. Gigamon pre-processes the traffic to be monitored and effectively increases the throughput of tools though features such as header stripping or slicing, as well as ensuring the tools only see the data they need to see.
Q
Does the Gigamon technology have a role to play in the
BYOD landscape?

A
More users and more devices are mobile in the enterprise network. The previous method of statically connecting tools to dedicated sections of the network is no longer scalable and sufficient because it leaves IT unable to respond in real time to ensure the best user experience. The pervasive nature and enhanced control afforded by the Visibility Fabric architecture helps the right traffic get to the right tool. It also allows for significantly reduced configuration management and change order approval relating to deploying monitoring tools. Tools can be added, changed or removed from the Visibility Fabric Architecture as network monitoring and business needs change.
Q
The Gigamon solutions address both
physical and virtual networks, do they
also address wired and wireless
networks?
A
Gigamon’s solutions abstract traffic for monitoring from any physical network TAP, from our GigaVUE-VM virtual Visibility Fabric node and/or any SPAN/mirror port. The point is that data traversing a wireless network must hit a physical network at some point. It’s at that time, that we’ll abstact the data for performance or security analysis.
Q
What was the recent announcement made
concerning how Gigamon can help mobile carriers
deal with the Big Data issue?
A
As Big Data continues to increase, there is little carriers can do to slow down the deluge of information traversing the networks. This is creating a problem for carriers in that incoming revenue (ARPU/Bit) is decreasing as providers are forced to offer larger pipes, without passing on the cost to customers. In addition, the strong argument that any increase in standard ARPU promotes churn, further deters carriers from increasing user prices This, combined with the rising cost of tools to analyze the vast amounts of data, causes the carriers’ existing business model to break down, forcing them to make a change.
The Gigamon solution
Gigamon can provide a way to avoid the additional problem of the cost of tools. Gigamon’s solution increases the effective throughput of tools, as well as decreases the rate at which Big Data grows. The solution allows carriers to continue using their existing lower speed tools for longer – negating the need to make changes that could adversely affect current business models.
Converge solution
Through existing features, such as filtering and de-duplication, and forthcoming features such as FlowVUE (representative sampling of complete flows within a pipe) and OLP (Off Line Processing – the time-shifting of data for analysis), the Big Data curve can be tamed.

Furthermore, as much of the data is pre-processed, Gigamon effectively increases the throughput of tools, though features such as header stripping or slicing, as well as ensuring the tools only see the data they need to see.
Furthermore once a Gigamon product is included in the network infrastructure, the ARPU/Bit curve is much less steep. Gigamon’s current advanced and forthcoming features will assist the carrier with finding new ways to generate income – such as through demographic analysis of Big Data.

Gigamon allows carriers to break out of the confinements of traditional business models and reinvest CapEx in new ways, as well as increase their competitive edge through subscriber cost reduction offers, or extra benefits. The rate of ARPU/Bit, therefore, is greatly reduced.
Q
You also announced a 40GB data centre-focused solution
recently?
A
Yes, the GigaPORT- Q08 blade for the H Series chassis that contains eight (8) ports of 40Gb QSFP+ for either network ports, tool ports or stack ports. It complements the GigaVUE-TA1 for Top-of-Rack (ToR) and End-of-Row (EoR) installations. One of the highlights of this combined solution is that users can aggregate multiple links
of traffic to be monitored, with a GigaVUE-TA1 traffic aggregation node, which consolidates multiple low utilisation links into “gateway” ports.

This aggregation can take place at the top of each rack and then send the traffic through the 40Gb ports of the GigaVUE-TA1 into the GigaPORT-HD0-Q08 blade in a GigaVUE H Series Node at the end of the row.
Q
What are the details of the announcement concerning a new
Visibility Fabric node, the GigaVUE-HB1 for branch offices, as
well as a proof-of-concept application called FlowVUE™?
A

The GigaVUE-HB1 extends Gigamon’s pervasive and intelligent visibility and packet modification into a customer’s remote sites and enables remote network monitoring by tunneling monitored data back to a central site for tool centralisation and consolidation through a unified Visibility Fabric architecture. The GigaVUE-HB1 Visibility Fabric node builds on Gigamon’s Unified Visibility Fabric architecture within the Services Layer and comes with the ability to perform GigaSMART® functions. GigaSMART offers the ability to normalise traffic and perform VXLAN decapsulation for monitoring virtualised network overlays, ERSPAN termination, packet de-duplication, packet masking and packet slicing, among others. FlowVUE will join the session-aware flow de-duplication application as the second visibility application to be developed by Gigamon in the Applications Layer. These applications offer flow-based correlation services to tools, ensuring optimal tool utilisation and performance by making network-based Big Data more manageable.
Q
What are the details of the recent GigaVUE-VM 2.0 release?
A
In short, the GigaVUE-VM 2.0 release includes support for Cisco’s Nexus 1000V virtual switch and seamless visibility for vMotion events for today’s agile virtual environments. Virtualisation is creating blind spots, or invisible networks, within server infrastructures making it difficult to secure the network traffic, diagnose problems, or analyse performance. Cisco Nexus 1000v Series are third-party distributed virtual switches that are fully integrated with VMware virtual infrastructure. In the Cisco Nexus 1000v Series, traffic between virtual machines is switched locally without ever hitting the physical switch, rendering existing monitoring and analysis tools blind to this traffic. Also, with vMotion, virtual machines are migrated from one host server to another. Without the ability to automatically migrate the visibility policies with the vMotion, visibility would be lost once the vMotion occurs and would require manual reconciliation.
Q
How does Gigamon work with the Channel, and is this model
fully developed or are there areas (both geographical and
industry-specific) that you are looking to grow?
A
Gigamon has a formal partner program in place and currently has hundreds of partners around the globe. Components of the program include certain discounts, certifications, technical training resources for partners, deal registration and dedicated channel sales managers. Gigamon plans to continue to invest in strengthening our existing relationships with channel partners and expanding our network by adding new channel partners to broaden our reach and target new end-user customers.
Q
Finally, what can we expect from Gigamon during the rest
of 2013?
A
We will continue to deliver innovative solutions that exist in the space between the network and the tools that monitor, manage and secure that network. We see a huge set of opportunities to extend and expand the power, functionality and value of our Visibility Fabric Architecture and we are committed to remaining the leader in the market that we created nearly ten years ago.