Ixia Phantom HD™

Network Packet Optimization Appliance for  Converged Networks:-

Data centers are quickly adopting virtualization as a key strategic initiative, but monitoring infrastructures often lack the flexibility to secure traffic from both physical and virtual sources. Now, the Ixia Phantom™ Solution uses the Ixia Phantom HD™ appliance to ease the virtualization transition by converging the physical and virtual monitoring infrastructures. The Phantom HD performs packet management, tunnel decapsulation and network traffic management, all on a single device.

Phantom Solutions for Virtual Visibility:-

The Ixia Phantom Solution for monitoring in a virtualized computing environment consists of four key components:

The Ixia Phantom vTap™ installs in the hypervisor of each physical server to provide access to all traffic in the server, including previously invisible inter-VM traffic.

The Ixia Phantom HD is a high-throughput tunneling appliance that performs traffic deduplication to ensure that tools inspect only a single copy of each relevant session. It decapsulates traffic from numerous Phantom vTaps, aggregates the resulting raw traffic, and sends it at 10 Gbps for inspection by instrumentation layer tools. The Phantom HD also strips multiple protocols to allow optimal tool utilization, both physical and virtual.

The Ixia Director™ network packet broker is an optional component that can manage the Phantom HD, aggregate raw traffic from the Phantom HD with traffic from physically monitored sources, and filter and switch it to monitoring tools.

Physical monitoring tools are the final component of the Ixia Phantom Solution for performance, security, and compliance monitoring in the virtualized environment.

Highlights:-

• Support monitoring of all virtualized data center traffic  

• Deliver overall capacity of 20 Gbps in 1U rack-mount  

• Deduplicate redundant traffic and send traffic of interest  to tools

• Initiate and terminate encapsulation tunnels

• Encapsulate or decapsulate tunneled traffic at 10 Gbps

• Handle fragmentation and defragmentation of  tunneled packets

Ixia Phantom HD Core Capabilities:-

High Throughput Decapsulation:-

The Phantom HD terminates tunneled traffic from Ixia Phantom vTaps or other sources. It aggregates inter-VM traffic that has been tunneled out of virtual hosts and encapsulated in new protocols that often make traffic invisible to monitoring tools. The Ixia Phantom HD appliance decapsulates and defragments that traffic, laying out the resulting raw traffic stream on a monitoring port connected to a switch such as the Ixia Director, or to another monitoring tool of choice.

Raw Traffic Encapsulation:-

The Phantom HD receives raw traffic from either virtual or physical devices, encapsulates it, and tunnels it over to the remote instrumentation layer for inspection. The Phantom HD supports 10 Gbps continuous throughput and is capable of handling traffic of interest from many virtual servers on multiple hypervisors. Fiber SR 10 Gigabit ports provide the input for the tunneled traffic and the output for the raw traffic. 

Deduplication and Filtering:-

The Ixia Phantom HD deduplicates redundant traffic from all areas of the network, eliminating tool overprovisioning with duplicate traffic, supporting tool lifespan and efficiency, and avoiding imprecise error reporting. The Phantom HD also performs sophisticated filtering, including BGP-based IP filters, and supports up to 5000 egress filters.

Easy Deployment:-

The compact, 1U Phantom HD is easy to add to your data center and simple to deploy. It can be conveniently managed by an Ixia Director CLI or by Phantom HD’s own CLI. Just plug it in, configure the IP addresses, and decapsulation begins.