Ixia Delivers Unprecedented Visibility into Virtual Data Center Traffic

Ixia, a leading provider of network testing, visibility, and security solutions, today announced that the company has extended the capabilities of CloudLens, Ixia’s recently announced integrated cloud visibility platform, with CloudLens Virtual Packet Broker (vPB). CloudLens vPB is a software solution that delivers visibility into virtual data center traffic for enterprises leveraging private cloud deployments to support and expand their business. 

Monitoring virtual machine (VM) to VM traffic (east-west traffic) in a virtualized data center creates a variety of challenges for IT and network administrators. One of the foremost challenges is the volume and transport of data to security and performance monitoring tools, virtual or physical.

Ixia CloudLens vPB is a packet processor that can be deployed in a virtual infrastructure to aggregate, filter, deduplicate, and distribute virtual traffic to security and performance monitoring tools, such as an intrusion protection, detection or data loss prevention system. This level of processing power typically requires a physical network packet broker appliance, but CloudLens vPB offers these capabilities as a virtual appliance, providing customers with flexibility and ease of deployment in dynamic virtual environments.

“Ixia understands that it’s a pivotal time for enterprises in terms of cloud adoption, public and private,” said Scott Register, vice president of product management at Ixia. “Therefore, we will continue to apply our expertise in network visibility, and invest time and resources, to develop solutions that enable organizations to fully realize the business benefits of a cloud environment, while maximizing investment in their existing security and monitoring tools.”

Ixia CloudLens vPB can be deployed as an inline device for filtering and packet processing and/or in load balancing scenarios. It can apply filters to incoming traffic, and only send select packets to monitoring tools and systems, thereby reducing load on those systems for improved performance. In addition, CloudLens vPB can apply load balancing rules to traffic targeted to virtual appliances.

Combining the power of Ixia’s CloudLens vPB, SSL decryption, and rich Netflow metadata generation, Ixia’s CloudLens platform provides service providers and enterprises with unprecedented insight into physical, virtualized, and hybrid environments. CloudLens enables security monitoring, performance analytics, and troubleshooting in a seamless, integrated solution.