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915-6881-01 Rev. A, January 2014www.ixiacom.com

The Secret to Surviving the Network Deluge

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Table of ContentsBuilding a Dynamic, Responsive Access Architecture ............................... 4

The Beating of Many, Many Wings ............................................................ 4

Visibility Makes an Ally of Change ........................................................... 5

Building a Responsive Architecture Across Industries ........................... 5

Products and Solutions: A Jurassic Approach to Scaling ......................... 7

Reaching New Horizons: Toward a Dynamic Access Architecture ........... 8

Total Visibility—the Key to Security .......................................................... 8

Visibility That Supports Evolution ............................................................... 8

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Building a Dynamic, Responsive Access ArchitectureToday’s networking landscape is growing so fast that the most expansive predictions risk underestimating the phenomenon. Both the extent and rate of growth are breathtaking—and that could seem like a trickle compared to what’s in store. This deluge is the result of rising video and all-IP traffic volumes, rapid migration to the cloud, and momentum toward 100 GbE and 4G LTE, all accelerated by the insatiable appetite for tablets and smartphones. A few facts underscoring our drive to communicate:

• Today, four billion devices are connected to the internet, including computers, phones, TVs—and even refrigerators! By 2015, this number will climb to 15 billion addressable devices, each creating its own usage data. 1

• Globally, cloud traffic will grow from just 11 percent of total data center traffic in 2010 to 34 percent by 2015. 2

• Cisco expects traffic to continue growing by an average of 92 percent in each of the next five years! 3

• Global data traffic rose more than 60 percent in 2010, driven by smartphones and 4G LTE network rollouts—a trend expected to continue. 4

• Revenue from U.S. wireless data growth alone will climb from $54 billion in 2010 to $107 billion in 2014, when it will generate more revenue than wireless voice. 5

The Beating of Many, Many Wings As the Angry Birds app flaps past half a billion downloads, the flock is delivering a myriad of lessons and insights. Unfortunately, some of these are learned after the fact—the most uncomfortable type of instruction. For example, service providers were recently blindsided by sudden, alarmingly massive spikes in 3G traffic. They did not know the source—and worse, didn’t know where to look for it. Angry Birds, which usually claimed a manageable eight percent of bandwidth, was now nesting on 352 percent! The spike was triggering millions of simultaneous downloads, increasing volume by ten times in just a day or two.

Even as engineers sifted through the traffic, the culprit was hiding in plain view: the spike had emanated not from data but from signaling driven by in-app advertising. Ads delivered at each new level of Angry Birds tripled signaling traffic on Android phones. Better visibility would have enabled engineers to pinpoint the source of the spike at a glance. Instead, they had searched in the wrong direction for something that did not exist. This situation illustrates the consequences of poor visibility: wasted time, effort and money plus an ongoing, deepening crisis.

The lesson here is not that an ostensibly benign application can suddenly rear up into a business monster. Unpredictability of that sort is predictable. The larger truth is that without visibility, one can’t even begin to define—let alone control—network issues, whether routine or sudden. Nobody wants to be battered by network turbulence, but given the rate of its growth, by the time we comprehend a situation and take action, the crisis or need may well have moved on already and the situation changed—likely for the worse. As bandwidth-hungry applications stress networks still further, the need for visibility, now and going forward, is urgent and inarguable.

As the Angry Birds app flaps past half

a billion downloads, the flock is

delivering a myriad of lessons and

insights

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As the pace of global economic activity accelerates, the network is more than ever the key to a company’s agility, productivity and competitive success.

Signaling generated by playing Angry Birds

Smartphone baseline

Angry Birds on AndroidAdvertising with each new game level

But ads delivered with each new Angry Birds level tripled signaling tra�c on Android phones.

Angry Birds on iPhoneNo AdvertisingNo Advertising

Overall, the Angry Birds application itself creates manageable amounts of network and data tra�c.

Num

ber o

f sig

nals

sen

t

8% increase

352% increase

0

500

1000

1500

2000

2500

Figure 1 – Signaling Diagram

Visibility Makes an Ally of Change Statistics on network growth are just a deluge of numbers. In the real world, we cannot afford to let the speed and volume of change outpace our ability to handle its challenges. It may seem like a sort of alchemy to be able to take statistics, turn them into business plans and proceed from there into real-world implementations. But I believe that not only can we cope with rapid growth and change, we can actually make them work for us. We can use these statistics and insights to develop a responsive network architecture that is flexible, visible, reliable, scalable and future-aware; that incorporates the highest levels of security while keeping costs under control.

Building a Responsive Architecture Across Industries As the pace of global economic activity accelerates, the network is more than ever the key to a company’s agility, productivity and competitive success. Organizations rely on the network to meet business challenges as never before. The question is, what capabilities do they need most urgently?

The answer may vary according to industry, but some needs, such as that for regulatory compliance, cut across all industries. Financial enterprises are eager to lower latency and raise availability as they handle huge transaction volumes in near real-time. They must also be able to capture and record certain types of data and retrieve that information instantly for compliance and auditing. And of course, in a split-second, highly competitive environment, security is business-critical.

Service Providers are challenged to meet the demands of growth: a telco moving from 3G to 4G and LTE amid tight competition and relentless demand for online video and social media needs a flexible, robust architecture to fulfill SLAs, anticipate and prevent negative service levels, build loyalty and market share, and stay ahead of arising trends. With wireless data and broadband growth placing huge pressures on the network and the

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hunger for connectivity unabated, global telecom spending for equipment and services will rise from $4.34 trillion this year to $5.31 trillion in 2014. 6

Monitoring Tools

Access

SwitchingThird FloorSecond FloorFirst FloorVLAN 1 VLAN 2 VLAN 3

ProtocolAnalyzer

PerformanceMonitor

PerformanceMonitor

PerformanceMonitor

VLAN 1 VLAN 2 VLAN 3 VLAN 1 VLAN 2 VLAN 3

INTERNET

Net Optics Director®Net Optics Director®Net Optics Director®

Financial Enterprise: Passive Access and Management of Network Traffic Monitoring Net Optics Director™ data monitoring switches enable visibility and centralize monitoring management along with inline network Taps to pass all of the link traffic—even packets with CRC errors—to the monitoring tool.

Figure 2 – Financial

Switching

Monitoring Tools

Billing PerformanceMonitor

ProtocolAnalyzer

Tra�cRecorder QoS

LawfulIntercept

INTERNET

Access

PSTN

Net Optics Director®

Service Provider: Monitor High-Volume Traffic In a Network Scaling to 4G - Tap the traffic between SGSNs and GGSNs using Director data monitoring switches. Aggregate traffic from multiple 10 gigabit links for flexible monitoring coverage. Smart Filtering™ appliances direct traffic of interest to monitoring tools.

Figure 3 – Service Provider

Healthcare organizations are concerned about complying with HIPAA and other regulations while maintaining control and confidentiality of patient records. They need the ability to implement telemedicine applications and to administer large distributed organizations. Government agencies for their part battle rising security threats and the need to handle growing public responsibilities and demands with shrinking budgets.

Healthcare organizations are

concerned need the ability to implement

telemedicine applications and

to administer large distributed

organizations.

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Once the most expansive way to conceptualize network growth, the solutions of today are no longer a resource for scaling to the levels anticipated by 2020.

Monitoring Tools

Access

Switching

Edge CoreDepartment Subnetworks

Medical Record File Servers

Lab, Web and Email Servers

Response TimeMonitor

DatabaseMonitor

Web ApplicationMonitor

NetworkAnalyzer

NetworkForensics

INTERNET

Net Optics Director®

Healthcare Company: Streamline Infrastructure and Solve Database Monitoring and Network Disruption Issues - Deploy Net Optics Director data monitoring switch in a new infrastructure; provide non-intrusive aggregation, regeneration, and filtering of traffic, allowing monitoring tools to operate at peak performance.

Figure 4 – Healthcare

Products and Solutions: A Jurassic Approach to Scaling I use the term Jurassic to emphasize how quickly once-standard approaches to growth can become fossilized. Certainly, the strategy of dealing with change by means of products has had its day. IBM says of Big Data that ninety percent of all data in the world today was created in the last two years alone!7 That volume of growth demands a new paradigm in network scaling. No matter how sophisticated your devices are, or how many of them you push into your infrastructure, they are not going to help you master the demands of growth. A solutions perspective is now becoming similarly outmoded. Once the most expansive way to conceptualize network growth, the solutions of today are no longer a resource for scaling to the levels anticipated by 2020. In a sense they are are no longer instruments but increments. And networks have grown beyond incremental product- and solution-based thinking.

PerformanceCompliance

NetworkIntelligence

Lawful Intercept

Security

VirtualRemote

Core Data Center

Net OpticsAccess

Architecture

Figure 5 – Dynamic Access Architecture

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Reaching New Horizons: Toward a Dynamic Access Architecture We at Net Optics envision a seamless, end-to-end Access and Monitoring Architecture that delivers total visibility and transcends the physical/virtual concept to enable robust and responsive security, accelerated performance, low latency and streamlined manageability. This new architecture delivers a keener focus on applications and enriches access capabilities from corporate headquarters across the distributed organization. Flexibility and responsiveness to change must be built into the fabric of the access infrastructure.

This flexible, open, standards-based and cost-efficient architecture grows without compromising performance or adding complexity. It maintains high applications availability and minimizes latency, while providing ample capacity and throughput to deal with rising traffic without wasting capacity. The new architecture is also environmentally aware, with a compact equipment footprint and reduced energy consumption. Manageability is key in lowering OpEx; administrative tasks are simplified and visible across the entire distributed organization.

Total Visibility—the Key to Security Security touches every aspect of the business landscape, so our architecture addresses security in every aspect as well, especially in shared environments. With new attackers alert to any vulnerability, the importance of total visibility cannot be overstated. In order to perform vital inspection, analysis and compliance activities, and to assess performance, traffic must be visible to the most sophisticated, network-based security devices at the instrumentation layer.

Visibility That Supports EvolutionThe cloud and virtualization are still new terrain, and companies remain wary regarding security and availability issues. Surrendering control—even at the promise of great benefits—demands confidence in the vendor. To reap the benefits of cloud computing and avoid its pitfalls, organizations need granular, end-to-end visibility for security, access control and separation of duties.

Net Optics is delivering the visibility that companies need to thrive in the cloud, as well as to realize the financial and efficiency potential of virtualization. We want customers to operate with confidence, to gain the control they need to meet the coming challenges, and to reap the benefits of progress in their networks.

Our virtualization vision opens new avenues of productivity, cost-efficiency, and environmental relief for our customers while securing applications and data. Our Dynamic Access and Monitoring Architecture provides total visibility to bridge the physical and virtual networks, so that a customer can rely on comparable levels of performance on both.

The Net Optics architecture also takes advantage of server virtualization and the mobility of VMs to streamline the transport of raw traffic to the instrumentation layer for peak monitoring efficiency. By implementing sophisticated tactics such as load balancing, we assure uninterrupted visibility for monitoring and security plus quick issue detection and resolution of power and equipment failure, without financial loss or impact on network

Manageability is key in lowering OpEx;

administrative tasks are simplified and visible across the entire distributed

organization.

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Visibility is the way that a company comprehends its network: how its applications and security instruments are performing and using the network.

productivity. The network smoothly manages even complex device implementations, enforcement of security policies, secure onboarding of new users, and monitoring of distributed sites.

Visibility is the way that a company comprehends its network: how its applications and security instruments are performing and using the network; how secure they are and how they can proactively resolve fast-arising issues. Total visibility is vital to network integrity because if shared applications and resources are compromised, the impact falls on countless applications and users. Only with an Access and Monitoring Architecture that provides total visibility to monitor both the physical and virtual arenas can a company realize virtualization’s many benefits. And only with total visibility can a company handle the challenges of unstoppable growth while seizing opportunities to benefit from that growth.

Notes

1. http://blog.sociocast.com/2011/10/2. Cisco® Global Cloud Index (2010 – 2015) http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/

collateral/ns341/ns525/ns537/ns705/ns1175/Cloud_Index_White_Paper.html3. http://coreanalysis1.blogspot.com/2011/07/bbtm-part-4tim-bittorrent.html4. http://searchtelecom.techtarget.com/feature/

TIA-deems-2011-a-good-year-for-telecom-market-growth5. Ibid. 6. Ibid.7. http://blog.sociocast.com/2011/10/

References

“Evaluating the Growth of Internet Traffic” http://www.circleid.com/posts/20111109_evaluating_the_growth_of_internet_traffic/

Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast update 2010-2015 http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns341/ns525/ns537/ns705/ns827/ white_paper_c11-520862.html

Cisco: “The Need for Speed! 40GbE & 100 GbE” http://www.stc.suny.edu/media/presentations/2011/the_need_for_speed.pdf

“Content and Network Security See Strong Growth” http://www.channelinsider.com/c/a/Security/Content-and-Network-Security-See-Strong-Growth-169174/

“TIA deems 2011 a good year for telecom market growth” http://searchtelecom.techtarget.com/feature/TIA-deems-2011-a-good-year-for-telecom-market-growth

“Predicting Cloud Computing Adoption Rates” http://softwarestrategiesblog.com/2011/07/24/predicting-cloud-computing-adoption-rates/

“Cloud Computing Security for DoD / Governments (U.S.)” http://scap.nist.gov/events/2011/itsac/presentations/day3/Mauro%20-%20Cloud%20Computing%20Security%20for%20DoD%20and%20Governments%20(U.S.).pdf

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About the Author

Bob Shaw, President and CEO, Net Optics, Inc.

As President and Chief Executive Officer of Net Optics since 2001, Bob Shaw is responsible for conceiving and implementing corporate vision and strategy, positioning Net Optics as the leading provider of intelligent access and monitoring architecture solutions in both the physical and virtual environments. Under Shaw’s guidance, Net Optics has achieved consistent double-digit growth, launched more than 35 new products, acquired over 8000 customers, and expanded its global presence in over 81 countries. The company is included in the elite Inc. 5000 list of highest performing companies for the second year in a row and won 2011 Best of FOSE honors. In addition, Net Optics received the coveted 2011 Red Herring Top 100 North America and Top 100 Global Awards for promise and innovation, the 2011 Best Deployment Scenario Award for Network Visibility, and many other accolades. Shaw’s leadership experience spans startups to Fortune 200 organizations, where he held Senior Vice Presidential executive positions. Shaw earned both a Bachelor of Arts degree in Business and a Bachelor of Science degree in Economics from Geneva College in Pennsylvania.

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915-6881-01 Rev. A, January 2014