Fixed and Mobile Service Providers have embarked on a network migration to 100G technologies and beyond driven by the insatiable bandwidth demands of Business and Consumer subscribers. Fortunately, recent networking technology advancements are driving down the cost-per-bit to enable a cost-effective migration. However, the products and technologies available to monitor and secure the increasing flows of traffic are falling behind, creating a trade-off between overspending on monitoring infrastructure vs. reducing visibility and increasing risk.

Network Visibility Challenge

Network Packet Brokers (NPBs) provide a 'visibility fabric' enabling organizations to access key traffic throughout the network and efficiently pass the traffic to monitoring and security tools. NPBs also support the critical task of extracting IP packets in a format required by tools to perform analysis. This advanced packet processing must keep up with increasing traffic rates, or the NPBs themselves can become the cause of undetected service outages and security breaches. The architecture of current NPBs cannot effectively scale to support N x 40/100G monitoring. The resulting increase in OPEX to perform traffic engineering within your visibility fabric is the first sign of NPB processing constraints. And when your NPB vendor presents you with an excessive cost estimate for additional packet processing blades and chassis to accommodate your traffic growth, you've hit the NPB tipping point.

The Solution: Network Packet Broker Offload

NetQuest's OMX Optical Monitoring Exchange leverages state of the art Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology to deliver high-density advanced packet
processing at 100G line-rate on all ports. You can maintain your existing NPBs, and now
scale your visibility fabric by simply offloading the advanced packet processing to the
OMX. The modular design supports up to four 8-port 100G cards within a single rack
unit (1RU) for up to 3.2Tbps of packet processing.

The OMX can be deployed in-line on the ingress links to the NPB, eliminating the
need to purchase additional NPB feature processing blades and chassis, yielding
significant CAPEX, rack space, power and cooling savings. Enabling OMX packet
processing features is easily done on a port-by-port basis via the User Interface or
RESTful API. The OMX can also be deployed as a Service Node within an NPB's service
chain, for full visibility and control of traffic flowing to/from the OMX using your
existing NPB management platform.

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