Network packet brokers are essential in driving visibility into every action currently taking place on an enterprise’s network. In addition, traffic patterns can be much more closely analyzed with this tool in place which ultimately helps organizations to ramp up efficiency.

This week, TMCnet Contributor Michelle Amodio revealed that while IT departments can sometimes have a hard time fully optimizing their networks, network packet brokers are proving time and time again to be essential in providing visibility down to the very last layer.

According to Amodio, “With a network packet broker in place, complex networks don’t seem so complex. The need for NPBs is more prevalent as the demands for faster network connectivity increases and ensuring continuous application performance in addition to loss mitigation.”

Further, when implementing VSS Monitoring’s VSS Management Center (vMC), the platform acts as a centralized GUI to maintain several vBroker appliances at once, which in turn lets system administrators successfully utilize more than one broker device at time while simultaneously adhering to filtering policies and analyzing vital report information.

In other news, Xerocole unveiled the Xerocole AnswerX, a solution touted as enabling broadband network operators to support both DNSSEC and DNS at the same time.

Rob Fleischman, CTO of Xerocole, said in a statement, “While DNSSEC is great for Internet security, its implementation can be complex and risky for Internet service providers. That’s because full DNSSEC support depends not only on a functional solution in a network operator’s own network, but also on correct behavior from the authoritative DNS servers.”

This product is now available and can be purchased via a pay-as-you-go model that comes complete with unlimited support.

Closing out the week, packet sampling was highlighted as being the ideal choice for monitoring all traffic that allows operators to fully customize various traffic patterns.

However, in order to effectively power these functions, you must first determine if you have a traffic control service already and if you then want to run that on a different device. For instance, TMCnet Special Guest Priya Natarajan asked, “If your service was developed in Java, how do you run it on native OS on a router?”

Natarajan added, “Some of these functions may be more compute intensive than others, bringing down the capacity of the router. We need the ability to take these services and process them in a separate plane instead of the data plane. Also, this hardware solution needs the ability to host these services. “