As the Enterprise network evolves to incorporate increasingly complex business applications and shift to SDN (software-defined networking) to enable fast, reconfigurable infrastructure the task of managing and maintaining the network becomes correspondingly difficult.

Here are 10 things the Omnia 10 does to help Enterprise network managers maintain their networks.

Network TAP functions duplicate the traffic flows across nodes on the network. The Omnia 10 then passes network data onto other tools such as monitoring systems or security tools for further analysis.

Additional functionalities such as packet inspection and filtering enable the Omnia 10 to deliver only specific network data – such as packets related to a particular application – to those tools.

The Omnia 10 can capture traffic directly from tapped links or SPAN ports straight to disk. A rolling capture dashboard allows the user to navigate through the historical capture data and drill down to the traffic of interest using various filters and real-time feedback such as IP addresses, protocols, and ports present in the selected traffic.

Analysing the captured traffic enables the troubleshooting of historical problems that have been reported by users, preventing re-occurrence in the future.

You can use the built-in WebShark application to open PCAP files captured directly within the Omnia 10, enabling troubleshooting of common network problems and malicious activity on your network as well as troubleshooting of business applications such as VOIP.

The Omnia 10 features its own custom DPI engine, capable of identifying 4000 different applications, even when they are ciphered, providing invaluable information to analytics, policy enforcement, and security tools.

De-duplication reduces the load on your network monitoring and management tools by removing duplicate network packets that would otherwise have been analysed by those applications. This prevents network tools from being overloaded by network traffic that has already been processed, allowing your network to scale without additional monitoring investment.

Traffic aggregation takes data received from multiple network ports and delivers it to a single port connected to a single port on your monitoring tool. This means you can monitor large amounts of network traffic without having to buy additional capacity on your monitoring tools to handle it.

Load balancing functionality within the Omnia 20 spreads traffic load from the network over different ports to your monitoring tools. Load balancing in this way has several benefits, including reducing the potential for overloading the monitoring tools you use, and re-balancing traffic across remaining active ports should some of the monitoring ports become unavailable.

In addition to aggregating traffic from multiple network ports to a single output port, the Omnia 10 can also replicate traffic.

Replicating network traffic allow you to deliver identical traffic flows to multiple sets of tools, for example to your network monitoring tools as well as security analysis tools.

As the amount of traffic on the network increases, so it becomes harder and costlier to search through and monitor the data. In these cases, IPFIX metadata reduces the burden of searching through and probing the full set of network data. The Omnia 10 can operate as an IPFIX probe, creating a stream of metadata from live network traffic, and delivering the metadata to your network tools for analysis, reducing the monitoring overhead and enabling them to handle larger volumes of network traffic without the need for upgrading those tools.

Omnia 10s AppMaster feature stack provides a full Linux environment to run network applications. With access to traffic from the packetbroker functionalities, the potential use cases are endless. AppMaster on the Omnia platform could potentially replace the functionality of an entire rack of appliances in a single unit.