Introduction to Gigamon

Recognized by Gartner and others as the market leading solution, Gigamon provides active visibility into physical and virtual network traffic, enabling stronger security and superior performance. Gigamon’s Visibility FabricTM and GigaSECURE®, the industry’s first Security Delivery Platform, deliver advanced intelligence so that security, network and application performance management solutions in enterprise, government and service provider networks operate more efficiently and effectively.

Gigamon’s Visibility Fabric™ has access to bidirectional network traffic so it has the ability to observe the exchange of public keys at the start of any transaction. Private keys are securely stored on the system. The power of the GigaSMART® traffic intelligence engine can decrypt the traffic and forward it to tools like NNM for analysis. Each GigaSMART module contains high-performance compute engines that have hardware performance accelerators to handle SSL traffic.

SSL Decryption is not limited to specific ingress ports or where the GigaSMART engine is located within the Visibility Fabric. Any traffic received on any network port in the cluster of Gigamon visibility nodes can take advantage of SSL Decryption. And that traffic can be sent to any tool ports in the cluster. This is an important attribute because not every node in the cluster needs to have the SSL Decryption capability. Furthermore, additional SSL Decryption throughput can be achieved by adding more GigaSMART modules to the cluster, allowing inspection to grow as SSL processing needs increase.

GigaSMART SSL-decryption functionality can be provided for NNM tools within the following Gigamon devices:

  • GigaVUE-HD4/HD8
  • GigaVUE-HC2
  • GigaVUE-HB1

This section describes the steps to integrate NNM with Gigamon’s solution, as well as an example deployment strategy.