In a recent interview, Ariana Lynn, Principal Analyst at The Fast Mode spoke to Christian Ferenz, CEO of Cubro Network Visibility on the impact of traffic visibility on modern IP networks. Christian joins us in a series of discussions with leading networking, analytics and cybersecurity companies, assessing the need for traffic filtering technologies that can deliver real-time, granular application awareness. The series explores how advanced analytics power various network functions amidst the rapid growth in traffic and applications.
Ariana: How do your solutions and products fulfil the demands of today's networks?
Christian: Cubro Network Visibility solutions and products are well-equipped to meet the demands of today’s networks, offering scalability, flexibility, advanced capabilities, interoperability, and cost-effectiveness. Our comprehensive portfolio of offerings is a key component for successful network monitoring, security, and analytics for service providers and enterprise organisations. Cubro’s advanced network packet brokers (NPBs) remove network traffic blind spots, optimise network traffic, filter network traffic, load balance, and support high-speed connections (currently) up to 400 Gbps. They are designed to meet the needs of complex networks and support numerous tunnelling protocols, including MPLS, MPLS over UDP, GRE, NVGRE, VXLAN, CFP, ERSPAN and GTP.
At Cubro Network Visibility, our solutions ensure a managed investment profile by facilitating smooth technology migration and reducing the loading on network tools to reduce network tools’ CAPEX and OPEX while increasing their ROI. With minimal network disruption, our products enable gradual tool migration while reducing network tool footprint, power, and cooling requirements. By efficiently managing traffic and providing support for complex overlay networks with the latest ASIC technology, Cubro's solutions future-proof your network infrastructure, ensuring long-term scalability and performance.
Ariana: What technologies are most effective in delivering real-time traffic visibility?
Christian: Below are some technologies and tools that are most effective in delivering real-time traffic visibility.
- Network TAPs: Network TAPs are essential for capturing network traffic for analysis. TAPs passively duplicate traffic from network links, ensuring that monitoring tools receive a complete and unaltered copy of the data.
- Network Packet Brokers (NPBs): Network Packet Brokers are purpose-built devices that aggregate, filter, and distribute network traffic to various network monitoring and security tools. They provide granular visibility by capturing and processing packets in real time, enabling network administrators to analyze traffic flows comprehensively.
- Deep Packet Inspection (DPI): DPI technology enables the examination of packet contents beyond the header information. DPI can identify specific applications and protocols by inspecting payload data and extract metadata for advanced traffic analysis. This level of visibility is crucial for understanding network behaviour and detecting anomalies or security threats.
- Flow-based Monitoring: Flow-based monitoring tools, such as NetFlow, sFlow, and IPFIX, collect summarized data about network traffic flows. They provide insights into traffic patterns, bandwidth utilization, and application performance in real-time. Flow-based monitoring is particularly useful for large-scale networks where capturing every packet might be impractical.
- Application Performance Monitoring (APM) Tools: APM tools monitor the performance and availability of networked applications in real-time. By measuring key performance indicators like response time, latency, and throughput, APM tools provide insights into application behaviour and user experience.
- Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFWs): NGFWs combine traditional firewall capabilities with advanced security features such as application-awareness, intrusion prevention, and SSL inspection. By inspecting traffic at the application layer, NGFWs provide visibility into application usage and help enforce security policies effectively.
In addition to the aforementioned technologies supporting real-time traffic visibility, Cubro offers a unique approach to CDR generation. Alongside flow-based monitoring, Cubro supports the generation of Call Detail Records (CDRs) utilizing an adjustable time window. This approach offers enhanced data compression while still providing subscriber-specific information in a condensed format. Moreover, it enables analytic systems to derive comprehensive insights from the data.
Christian’s journey into entrepreneurship began in 2003 as a distributor of measurement instrumentation. Sensing an unmet need for superior network monitoring solutions, Christian, alongside his astute business partners, took the bold leap to establish Cubro. Fuelled by Christian's visionary outlook, Cubro swiftly evolved, pioneering cutting-edge TAPs and Packet Broker lines that revolutionized the industry. With an unwavering commitment to innovation and excellence, Christian steered Cubro toward international acclaim as the company quickly expanded its global reach. Today, Cubro stands tall as one of the foremost vendors in TAPs and Network Packet Brokers, boasting partnerships with the world's largest Telcos and Enterprises, with installations spanning every continent.
This interview is a part of The Fast Mode's Traffic Visibility segment, featuring leading networking, analytics and cybersecurity companies and their views on the importance of network intelligence and DPI for today's IP networks. A research report on this topic will be published in June 2024 - for more information, visit here.
