Monthly Archives: June 2018

Packets Rule – an affirmation during an East Coast Road Trip

June 29, 2018

Tom Nakamura, a colleague and I just finished an East Coast road trip to visit prospects, customers, and partners.  Thanks to those we met and their hospitality, allowing us to present and discuss SYNESIS to them and their respective teams.

One of our stops was to meet and strategize with our tech partners and friends at Garland Technologies at their HQ in Buffalo, New York.  BTW: I just love their tagline: “See every bit, byte, and packet.” Big thanks to Chris Bihary, Garland Technology CEO, for his thoughts, vision, guidance, and hospitality.  Both Tom and I now know more about Garland and are looking forward to future joint marketing and solution engagements.

We also made other stops in the New Jersey and Manhattan, NY area.  One important affirmation during our road trip:  While packet capture may be considered outdated to some, the engineers in charge of actually solving the toughest network and security problems live and die by their packet data.  Whether for security, performance, or application issues, complete and reliable packet captures and resulting tracefiles are the primary and most reliable data source for troubleshooting.  Furthermore, that data can be further visualized and reanalyzed using complementary tools, whether available now or still to be engineered.  It’s like newfound DNA from a suspect of a decades old crime.  Once you have it, a suspect can be justly blamed or exonerated.  The same applies in networking.  When someone tells you that your “network is slow” nothing beats complete packet data to help you fix the problem or to prove the conclusion was premature.

Angelo Bustos
Solutions Consultant Director
angelo.bustos@toyotechus.com

Yoko Nonaka’s Interop Tokyo 2018 Recap

June 22, 2018

What a privilege it was for our SYNESIS to be part of ShowNet.  ShowNet was the network for Interop Tokyo 2018.  Facebook: https://ja-jp.facebook.com/interop.shownet/  The network involved 60 vendors, 400 engineers, and 80M USD of equipment.  Carefully planned for months in advance, actual physical deployment started two weeks before the start of Interop Tokyo.  All equipment was connected and thoroughly tested.  You can just imagine the flurry of events that occurred during that period.  The ShowNet network went live during Interop, not just for show, but  also to protect the event and all participants from cyberattacks.  TOYO Corp’s contribution in ShowNet was our very own SYNESIS Distributed 100G.

SYNESIS was appropriately nicknamed by the Network Operations Center as the “Messiah”, always connected to their 100GbE packet aggregation point, collecting every single byte that appeared in the ShowNet network.  If it happened in ShowNet, then SYNESIS kept a record of it, no packet left behind.  SYNESIS 100G, was installed in the monitoring area dedicated for forensics in case of incidents.  SYNESIS performed perfectly during the entire event.  You can imagine the bandwidth heavy applications in these events.  Even during peak traffic rates, not a single packet was loss by SYNESIS.

Looking back, ShowNet and Interop Tokyo 2018 was a very memorable highlight in my career.  It was so exciting to work with over 400 engineers from different companies.  We were colleagues for just a few days but the friendships and fond memories will remain with me for a long time.   I cannot wait until next year.

Yoko Nonaka

SYNESIS Marketing, TOYO Corp. Japan

nonakay@toyo.co.jp

SYNESIS and Garland Technology @Cisco Live! 2018

June 15, 2018

I just attended “Cisco Live! 2018,” held from June 10-14 in Orlando,Florida – it was a very impressive event!  TOYO Corporation Japan has carried Garland Technology products with great success in Japan so I was fortunate enough to have been invited to join them this year at the event as a valued partner.  Every day the Garland Technology booth was filled with many excited visitors from all over the world looking for solutions to help them manage and improve their networks.  Well, they came to the right booth.  Garland Technology, backed by the world’s most advanced technologies, provides complete network visibility with 100% network uptime.

For myself, I had excellent opportunities of introducing our sophisticated “SYNESIS-Garland Joint Solution”.  My conversations with the many skilled engineers from all over the world confirmed that we do indeed have a first-class solution.

Download the SYNESIS-Garland Joint Solution!

Kensaku Hashimoto
SYNESIS Product Manager

hashimotok@toyo.co.jp

Contact us for more information!

Reducing the Noise during Packet Capture

June 6, 2018

Having packet visibility by way of a network recorder to troubleshoot intermittent network problems is a good problem to have.  Complement that with a good network monitoring tool (i.e. netflow collector and visualizer) and you’ll typically have all you need at the most granular level when investigating network issues.  However, trying to manage the data deluge for any network related investigation is like trying to find a needle in a haystack.  To minimize your investigation time you’ll need to “reduce the noise”.  Don’t save what you don’t need.

If your network recorder has built-in hardware filtering then you’re in luck.  You can selectively store only what is of interest.  Since filtering is done at the hardware level, a performance hit on the network recorder won’t be an issue.  Common network recording filter configurations are:

  • VLAN ID
  • IP Address
  • QoS Value
  • Layer 2 or 3 application
  • …or some value at a fixed offset

A more comprehensive solution involves a network packet broker that can provide packet visibility from different parts of your network, centralize it, then forward it to tools that may benefit.  For example, Garland Technologies has a great solution.  With Garland’s EdgeLens, you’ll have complete packet visibility for any Ethernet interface (1G/10G/40G/100G).  Since EdgeLens supports 100Gb/s interfaces, no network is too large.  Pair it with a matching 100Gb/s network recorder like TOYO Corp’s SYNESIS and you’ll always have the packets needed for your network investigations.

Download our joint solution.

 

Angelo Bustos

Solutions Consultant Director

angelo.bustos@toyotechus.com