Ixia has introduced its ControlTower architecture to help cloud hosting facilities and large enterprise campuses scale and rapidly deploy multiple segments for centralized, intelligent monitoring. The scalable ControlTower architecture provides a single user interface for comprehensive monitoring of network performance and security tools housed in dispersed racks or geographic locations.

The ControlTower architecture builds on the capabilities of the Ixia Anue Net Tool Optimizer (NTO) network monitoring switches, which aggregate, filter, load balance and de-duplicate network traffic to intelligently connect data center and cloud provider networks with monitoring tools. This enables network operators to meet increasing bandwidth demands while retaining critical, packet-level visibility into application performance and security at line rate, all managed via a simple yet powerful central interface.

The ControlTower architecture extends the boundaries of the visible network beyond a single data center with a highly scalable approach that improves monitoring of distributed environments by providing:

• Maximum efficiency: Powered by the Anue NTO’s custom dynamic data traffic filtering capabilities, network monitoring switches filter traffic upon ingress to reduce traffic on the interconnect links and the potential for dropped packets.
• Simple usability and control: Ixia’s user interface presents the entire distributed visibility environment as a single switch, allowing administrators to add new monitored network segments with no added management complexity or overhead — making management of a large number of network segments just as easy as managing one.
• Flexible deployment options: Using Ixia’s ControlTower architecture, network monitoring switches may be easily deployed in a single high-density stack, distributed across the top of multiple racks in a data center or distributed to multiple buildings in a campus environment.

“As businesses continue to expand both their use of and reliance on secure, high-performing IT infrastructures, they are moving toward modular approaches that can include both internal and external cloud resources,” said Jim Frey, Vice President of Research for Network Management at Enterprise Management Associates. “Servers, storage and networking components are more often virtualized and can be activated as needed, and so monitoring strategies need to be flexible and scalable to keep pace. Distributed packet monitoring architectures such as Ixia’s ControlTower are critical for maintaining visibility in the face of dynamic resource provisioning and agile, hybrid environments.”

Ixia will demonstrate the ControlTower products at Booth No.1951 at Interop Las Vegas, May 7-9.