Ultimately this is one of the things that SDN schemes such as OpenFlow bring a data center for free. Distributed flow statistics collection through OenFlow's extensible infrastructure gives you a huge range of reporting and analysis capabilities, with no taps needed. Every network port is in essence a tap.
Here's an interesting paper on one open source OF tool: https://www.nas.ewi.tudelft.nl/people/Fernando/papers/MonitoringOpenFlow.pdf -mel beckman > On Jun 21, 2015, at 9:50 PM, Mitch Howards <hbf9...@hotmail.com> wrote: > > Hello All, > > Was wondering what folks are using to monitor traffic > on their networks. Looking into Ixia and APCON devices for dedup and > other filtering features as well as passive fiber TAPs to capture the > traffic. > > How are folks handling TAP'ing large data center > networks? TAPs at the "distribution layer" would be the best fit for my > network but that would require a ton of passive fiber TAPs for the > incoming fibers to the distribution switches. The end goal is to not > only capture the north-south traffic on the network but also east-west > traffic. It seems more efficient to just use SPANs but there are many > limitations using SPANs. > > Thanks in advance for any suggestions. > > Mitch
