Gigamon ships its first terabit-scale monitoring switch

Network monitoring vendor Gigamon will ship its first chassis-based switch later this month, one with a 1 Tbps backplane and room to grow. Gigamon builds switches that filter high-speed traffic coming from a network tap or a mirror port, prepping it for applications that analyze the data. Previously, its switches have been mostly fixed in their configuration, although they could be stacked if customers wanted to use more than one in the same location. That approach has its limitations, however, when you are dealing with very large and very high-speed networks. THE MARKET: Network Packet Monitoring Matrix Switches “Gigamon’s founders didn’t think it would be as big of a niche as it turned out to be,” says Mike Valladao, product manager for Gigamon. The company is just seven years old, but it has found its way into the networks of five of the Fortune 10 companies, he says. The new GigaVUE-HD8 switch is an eight-slot chassis. The terabit backplane provides enough headroom for up to 96 ports of 10 Gigabit Ethernet and 32 ports of Gigabit Ethernet – or up to 352 ports of Gigabit Ethernet and 32 ports of 10 Gigabit, depending on the modules used. Such density should allow large enterprise customers to consolidate their individual, stacked switches onto this one switch. It has redundant controller cards and power supplies, and a five-year warranty. Gigamon also hinted that the switch would be ready to handle even higher-speed links, such as 40Gbps or 100Gbps. The switch uses a new operating system. Previous Gigamon switches had used an embedded open-source operating system called eCos. It is now using a Linux kernel, as eCos has scaling limitations, Valladao says. The GigaVUE-HD8 is scheduled to ship on June 20.