Gets what it needs from GigaStor network analyzer, verified fast by Tolly Group
How fast is fast really? That’s a question always top of mind for network managers when they hear vendors tout line-speed rates and other such metrics. Now Network Instruments has the confirmation it needs when claiming its GigaStor 10 Gb Wire Speed network analyzer can save traffic to disk at line rate on full-duplex 10 gigabit-per-second links.
In its evaluations, testing firm Tolly Group verified that the GigaStor appliance captured and wrote to disk at line rate, bidirectional 10-Gbps network traffic with zero frame loss, Network Instruments reported.
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For Kwik Trip, a Midwest convenience store chain that already has found considerable value in GigaStor, the verified performance across 10-Gbps links is great news, says Chuck Serauskas, LAN and WAN administrator at the La Crosse, Wis., company.
The fast-growing chain, which generally opens 20 new stores each year for a total of 412 today, is in the process of deploying 10-Gbps links between a newly built disaster recovery site and its main data center. The two sites, connected by black fiber, will be completely redundant. “We’re currently splitting our virtual machine environment between the two sites, and that’s where the 10 Gig comes in,” he says.
“If we lose our building here then all of our stores will still be able to operate and do everything they normally would because we’ll have total replication,” describes Serauskas, noting that almost 90% of the chain’s servers are virtual and that the company has recently revamped its data center, migrating from an old rack system to a pod system with in-line cooling and the redundant backup.
Always important, assuring that the GigaStor is capturing all packets is now an absolute imperative, he says.
“We’ve got to be able to capture all that traffic traveling across the backup to make sure all the replicated data is getting to the disaster recovery site,” Serauskas says. “If there are problems with the IBM AS/400 or VM replication, we’ve got to be able to verify the network is communicating right and another issue is causing the problem.”
That harkens back to the original reason Kwik Trip brought in the GigaStore appliance six years ago, Serauskas says.
“Whenever servers or other equipment weren’t working like they were supposed to of course it was ‘always the network,'” he says of the complaint with which many network managers find themselves regularly contending. “That spurred us to get GigaStor for basic application troubleshooting and network capture but we’ve grown into using it for a lot of other things, too.”
For example, GigaStor has helped with Kwik Trip’s PCI compliance reporting, Serauskas says.
“We have a forensics piece on GigaStor that lets us run Snort bleeding-edge filters over captures to look for strange or bad things on our network. Our security officer uses this on a quarterly basis for PCI compliance,” he says.
Once Kwik Trip put GigaStor in place, Serauskas says, “it quickly became a tool we couldn’t live without. Now we can get to an answer where before we couldn’t without digging through tons of logs and still then couldn’t really tell much about the problems.”
Which tools have given you irrefutable proof that the network isn’t the culprit? Shoot me an email with your story.
