How to Deal with Network Capacity Expansion

As throughput on the 100Gb link increases, you will need to connect and load balance traffic among multiple devices. Advanced packet brokers can be set to split traffic between the cybersecurity devices. As the traffic load increases on the 100Gb link, adding another inline appliance to manage the network capacity needs to be simple.

If one of the devices fails, you must detect the failure (using heartbeat detection) and have the NPB automatically bypass it, so it will not have an adverse effect on the other deployed solutions. The traffic will then have to be configured to load balance between the remaining devices, or to fail-open or fail-close to the network.

These NPB features enable the IT department to use the existing lower-throughput devices on the newly migrated 100Gb network. The extended life of your existing security solution devices will enable you to defer the allocation of a higher budget upfront for more expensive, higher throughput security solution devices and capacity expansion.

Judicious use of advanced packet brokers will provide you a ‘pay-as-you-grow’ migration process where you can increment lower-cost security solution devices, as needed for your network, thus rationalizing your deployment.

Niagara Networks Advanced Network Packet Brokers meet all of these criteria.

It introduces a visibility adaptation layer between your network infrastructure and your cybersecurity services and can be configured to load balance traffic between the attached devices. The Packet Broker sophisticated flow-aware load balancing schemes are user-configurable, and various load balance schemes can be supported simultaneously for different sets of connected cybersecurity devices.

Moreover, the advanced second-generation packet broker will dynamically adjust the load balancing based on the number of actively attached devices, as detected by the heartbeat mechanism. Deployment of the Niagara Networks advanced packet brokers will thus beneficially affect the overall ROI of your 100Gb network migration.