Network monitoring company Simena has positioned itself to help companies that rely on the speed of their networks and realize network monitoring is a top priority to ensure the health of their mission-critical networks. According to Processor, Simena created the Packet Flow Switch, or PFS based on research and development and input from customers that were using other products. With up to 24 wire-speed Ether-net ports in each PFS, the appliance’s Web-based GUI allows multiple PFSes to be clustered into a virtual switch of up to 500 ports. It collects packets from routers, switches, and load balancers and sends them to traffic analyzers, loggers, or monitoring systems and also conducts load balancing and other network tasks.
“Simena’s PFS is different from other switches in a couple of ways. ‘When you use a networking or Ethernet or Layer 2 or 3 switch, the end user doesn’t decide where packets go; the switching decision is made by hardware,’ Uysal says. ‘That’s fine for many typical networks, but when a network needs to be monitored carefully and you want to know about certain packets from certain locations, a regular switch isn’t as useful.’ In the networks Uysal is talking about, where every packet is critical, companies need a switch that lets them regulate traffic the way they want to.”
