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Management, Test Access and Network Performance Solutions for the Enterprise
Packet Flow Switch - 10/100/1000BT, GigE, 10GigE
Packet Flow Switch is a network appliance that can be used as a tool aggregator, traffic consolidator, or traffic divider for multiple destinations.
With up to 22 10/100/1000 and two 10G Ethernet ports, it allows users to collect packets from many sources and send them to various devices optionally with packet slicing. Through the it's web based user interface, it is very easy to create any-to-many, many-to-many and many-to-any connections
Key Benefits
- Load balance heavy traffic to multiple monitoring tools
- Multicast critical traffic to multiple security devices
- Aggregate of several streams of traffic to a single network tool
- Save valuable SPAN ports & TAPs by distributing traffic to various tools
- Bridge traffic between expensive 10G and multiple 1G ports
- Collect packets independent of speed or media type
- Create innovative traffic scenarios with any-to-any connections
- Reduce chatty SPAN port traffic by layer 1-7 filtering
- Media & speed conversion among 10/100/1000M, GigE, 10GigE ports
- Increase productivity in troubleshooting
- Dynamic TAP creation with optional by-pass failover
Applications
- Load balancing heavy traffic to multiple monitoring tools
- Sharing expensive network tools among many SPAN ports and TAPs
- Multicasting critical traffic to multiple security devices
- Bridging traffic between expensive 10G and multiple 1G ports
- Layer 1-7 filtering and packet slicing to reduce the chatty SPAN/TAP traffic
- Dynamically creating aggregating and regenerating TAPs with media and speed conversion
Features
- Any-to-any connections
- Layer 1-7 filtering
- Packet slicing
- Media conversion
- Matrix switching
- Aggregating, non-aggregating and regenerating TAPs
- Active or passive by-pass failover
- In-line wire speed packet capture
- All ports can be used for any function
- Optional software features such as packet generation, network emulation, network measurement
Packet Flow Switch is a network appliance that can be used as a tool aggregator, traffic consolidator, or traffic divider for multiple destinations.
With up to 22 10/100/1000 and two 10G Ethernet ports on PFS2000 model, PFS, acting as a aggregation and filtering switch, allows users to collect packets from many sources and send them to various devices. Through it's web based user interface, it is very easy to create any-to-many, many-to-many and many-to-any connections.
For example, as a traffic aggregation tool, the Packet Flow Switch can be used to collect packets from sources such as routers, switches, and load balancers. These packets can then be sent to various traffic analyzers, loggers or monitoring systems. The flexibility we have in our configuration will eliminate requirements for TAP devices and saves valuable SPAN ports on switches.
Simena's extensive packet filtering allows users the capability to pick and choose which packets to be forwarded.
Packet Flow Switch (PFS) allows users to collect packets from many sources and send them to various devices. Through PFS's web based user interface, it is possible to create any-to-many, many-to-many and many-to-any connections.
PFS can be used as a traffic aggregation tool to collect packets from various sources such as routers, switches, load balancers; and send them to traffic analyzers, loggers or network monitoring systems. Flexibility in configuration eliminates requirement on TAP devices and valuable SPAN ports on switches.
Packet slicing feature allows users to forward packets with headers only by striping the payload or any portion of the packet to eliminate overloading of monitoring tools. Users can specify to slice packets from 64 to 4096 bytes.
Powerful BPF packet filtering allows users to pick and choose which packets would be forwarded. PFS can use up to 22 ports and up to 10G speeds with jumbo frame support.
PFS is also available on PTC3000 and NE3000 models of Network Emulator as well as TG1000 and TG2000 models of Traffic Generator family.
XML Based Filters
Network Emulator has extensive XML based packet filters for Ethernet, IP, IPV6, TCP and UDP packet filtering. Filters allow users to pick significant packets to expose to network impairments. They can be logically combined with AND, OR and NOT operators to create complex filter sets.
XML based packet filtering allows users to define any type of packet filter in an XML file. Newly defined filters can be used instantly in the web based filters page. This filtering method provides capability of easily defining packet filters for new implementations such as IPTV, iSCSI, IPV6, 4G.
In addition, Custom Filters provides filtering anywhere inside the packet including payload for deep packet inspection.
XML based filters can easily be created by editing the configuration file. Below shows a iSCSI filter for filtering iSCSI messages:
<header name="iSCSI">
<label>iSCSI packets</label>
<filter>tcp[0:2] = 3260</filter>
<label>iSCSI opcode</label>
<operator name="iscsi_opcode" title="iSCSI OPCODES=
0x00 NOP-Out,
0x01 SCSI Command,
0x03 Login Request,
0x04 Text Request,
0x05 SCSI Data-Out,
0x06 Logout Request,
0x10 SNACK Request,
0x20 NOP-In,
0x21 SCSI Response,
0x22 SCSI Task Management function response,
0x23 Login Response,
0x24 Text Response,
0x25 SCSI Data-In,
0x26 Logout Response,
0x31 Ready To Transfer,
0x32 Asynchronous Message,
0x3f Reject
"> 0x00, 0x01, 0x03, 0x04, 0x05, 0x06, 0x10, 0x20, 0x21, 0x22, 0x23, 0x24, 0x25, 0x26, 0x31, 0x32, 0x3f</operator>
<filter>tcp[32] amp; 0x3fff = $iscsi_opcode</filter>
Packet Capture
Simena's PFS is also capable of capturing packets in-line while providing any-to-any connections. PFS captures high speed data packets and saves them in PCAP format for future analysis. Capturing can be selective by using packet filters and by specifying number of packet to capture. For wire speed large amount of packet capture a dedicated Simena Traffic Generator with Capture&Replay feature is recommended.
Statistics
PFS has also extensive statistical features to show throughput in tabular and graphical formats. Statistics can be saved in CSV formatted files.
