APCON and Riverbed Technology
Solution Brief
In today’s fast-paced and continually evolving markets, companies of all sizes
absolutely depend on their data networks to maintain their competitive edge in
the marketplace. That edge dissolves when network application performance
slips, which in turn causes end user dissatisfaction. Applications are the
means for businesses to reach customers, build products, automate business
processes, and perform almost every other task critical to the business. For
IT organizations, fast, reliable application performance is the most visible
indicator of their success. Network speed and reliability has grown from a side
issue to become the critical path, and resolving problems quickly is simply
no longer good enough. Network slowdowns and outages must be prevented
rather than repaired.
The business-critical nature of application monitoring is why more than 20,000
companies worldwide use Riverbed Technology to manage their application
performance. Riverbed SteelCentral™ solutions provide IT with the visibility
and actionable insight to help deliver the application performance that users
and businesses demand. The SteelCentral solution correlates across the three
critical parts of the application delivery chain: end user experience, transaction
tracing, and the underlying network and infrastructure to deliver a powerful,
predictive, and common toolset for solving today’s application performance
management challenges.
A comprehensive application performance monitoring strategy that provides a
competitive advantage includes the ability to:
■ Monitor any point of the network at will
■ Collect data streams from a variety of sources and merge them into a
continuous flow
■ Direct the right flow to SteelCentral AppResponse and/or SteelCentral
NetShark appliances at any point in time
■ Filter the flow to provide only the data that your SteelCentral tools need
Network architectures are growing to meet business and customer data
needs. As a result, there is growing complexity in managing and monitoring
a network efficiently. By utilizing an APCON intelligent network monitoring
switch, customers can gain greater visibility and scale of their Application
Performance Monitoring investment by monitoring across multiple network
layers, zones and monitoring points.
The APCON Solution
The APCON solution enables the aggregation of packets from multiple
mission-critical monitoring points. Utilizing APCON’s INTELLAFLEX solution,
customers can then manipulate, filter and load-balance this traffic to the
appropriate monitoring tool.
Solution Brief - Riverbed Technology and APCON
Data Center
Core
SPAN
or
TAP
E-Commerce
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Mirror
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Extranet / Partner
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INTELLAFLEX Blade
ACI-3032-E36-1
JJ
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Measuring
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Figure 1: The APCON INTELLAFLEX
Series 3000 provides a highly available,
fault tolerant and scalable architecture
suitable for use in a production data
center running real-time application
performance analytics.
Power
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1/10 Gbps Ethernet
Network
Management
INTELLAFLEX™ Blade
ACI-3030-E36-6
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I NTELLA F LEX ™
ACI–3144–XR
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1/10 Gbps Ethernet
DOWN ENTER
INTELLAFLEX Blade
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PPS/IRIG
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Hit [Enter] for configuration
UP
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1/10 Gbps Ethernet
3144-XR
S/N: 72020004
Ver: 1
CANCEL
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1/10 Gbps Ethernet
Port
SPAN/
Mirror
Port
1/10 Gbps Ethernet
Distribution SPAN/
Mirror
DMZ
Packet Aggregator
1/10 Gbps
Status
A
Power
Security
Troubleshooting
Enterprise-grade data center monitoring switches must have the ability to bond several disparate data streams
from external-facing, DMZ, and internal switches, and route all this data to SteelCentral tools with packet tags
that indicate the source of the data. Further, the switch must be able to filter both individual and aggregated data
streams using both pass and drop filtering. Figure 1 shows example of topology that enables multiple monitoring
points to be wired to various types of monitoring tools.
Production Network – DMZ
APCON Monitoring Platform
Manage DMZ Traffic to Tools
Internet
External
Aggregation
Zone 1
Zone 2
More Zones
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GPS
ANT
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Status
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INTELLAFLEX™ Blade
ACI-3030-E36-6
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GPS
ANT
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DOWN ENTER
INTELLAFLEX Blade
ACI-3032-E36-1
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IN
OUT
Hit [Enter] for configuration
UP
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1/10 Gbps Ethernet
INTELLAFLEX Blade
ACI-3032-E36-1
JJ
3144-XR
S/N: 72020004
Ver: 1
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11
PPS/IRIG
IN
OUT
10.1.102.72 / 255.255.0.0
26.7ºc
CANCEL
1/10 Gbps Ethernet
SPAN
from switches
DMZ
Server
Switches
Packet Aggregator
1/10 Gbps
Status
B
Power
Packet Aggregator
1/10 Gbps
Status
Power
A
Figure 2: The APCON INTELLAFLEX
Series 3000 aggregates packets
copied from SPAN and TAP sources
throughout the network and aggregates,
manipulates, and filters the packet
stream before passing the data to the
SteelCentral tools.
Solution Brief - Riverbed Technology and APCON
Finally, application performance monitoring with SteelCentral tools increasingly involves packet latency monitoring
as a means of tracking performance issues to particular locations within the data center. Precise and accurate time
stamping of packets monitored as they traverse the data center is a requirement for a fully functional application
performance monitoring program.
Solution: APCON and Riverbed
APCON provides an enterprise-grade intelligent network monitoring switch solution with the port density, overall port
count and throughput capacity, and high availability to handle the volume of data generated in a modern data center.
APCON also provides time stamping capability at the nanosecond level and the ability to eliminate duplicate packets,
slice packets at the header, and filter packets on any criteria.
This allows network engineers to bring together data inputs from any point on the network, aggregate and
manipulate the data at the packet level, and then direct those data flows to any SteelCentral™ AppResponse or
SteelCentral™ NetShark tool in inventory for analysis.
Production Network
WAN
WAN
Layer-3
DMZ
SPAN / TAP
Inputs
Core
Figure 3: Monitoring tools leveraging the
APCON intelligent network monitoring
switch can be scaled across the data
center. Additional sites can also be
managed using APCON’s TITAN multiswitch management software.
Layer-3
APCONTAP
Distribution
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Layer-3
EXPANSION
Multiple Distribution Modules
Access / ToR
Layer-2
EXPANSION
Multiple Access Modules
SPAN from all Access Switches
Packet Aggregator
1/10 Gbps
1/10 Gigabit Fiber Ethernet
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APCON TAPs
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INTELLAFLEX™ Blade
ACI-3030-E18-6
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ENTER
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Power
INTELLAFLEX™ Blade
ACI-3030-E18-6
CANCEL
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INTELLAFLEX™ Blade
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1/10 Gbps Ethernet
1/10 Gbps Ethernet
INTELLAFLEX™ Blade
ACI-3030-E36-6
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Packet Aggregator
1/10 Gbps
Status
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Power
Packet Aggregator
1/10 Gbps
Status
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Power
TITAN
Switch Management
Packet
Analyzer
IDS
Malware
User
Detection Experience
APCON Monitoring Platform – Manage Production Traffic to Tools
With a comprehensive network monitoring system in place, network engineers can proactively monitor application
service levels, bottlenecks, and spikes in network activity and accurately allocate resources for maximum network
efficiency.
Solution Brief - Riverbed Technology and APCON
About APCON
APCON develops scalable network switching solutions for enterprise data
centers worldwide. APCON intelligent network monitoring switches and
taps provide complete network visibility, improve network security and
optimize monitoring tool efficiency. APCON’s filtering and aggregation
technology and multi-switch management software minimizes network
downtime and maximizes monitoring tool investments.
Learn more about APCON at www.apcon.com.
APCON, Inc.
9255 SW Pioneer Court
Wilsonville, Oregon 97070 USA
Tel: 503–682–4050
© 2014 APCON, Inc. All rights reserved.
SteelCentral is a trademark of Riverbed Technology.
13044-R4-0814