In a recent interview, Ariana Lynn, Principal Analyst at The Fast Mode spoke to Max Rottenkolber, Snabb Developer at Igalia on the impact of traffic visibility on modern IP networks. Max joins us in a series of discussions with leading networking, analytics and cybersecurity companies, assessing the need for traffic filtering technologies that can deliver real-time, granular application awareness. The series explores how advanced analytics power various network functions amidst the rapid growth in traffic and applications.
Ariana: How do your solutions and products fulfill the demands of today's networks?
Max: Snabbflow is a standards compliant IPFIX exporter to provide network visibility to operators. It runs on commodity server hardware and supports network links of up to 400G without falling back to packet sampling. It is prominently deployed in SWITCH.ch networks to make sure their operators can track traffic activity without missing a single flow. SWITCH.ch is the national research and education network of Switzerland, established in 1987.
Ariana: What challenges do you often face in using existing traffic visibility tools?
Max: Most IPFIX solutions on offer typically rely on packet sampling to handle large amounts of traffic, meaning that flow statistics are approximated and the majority of network packets remain invisible to engineers. SWITCH.ch rely on Snabbflow to gain fully visibility into their high-bandwidth networks, which is capable of processing and tracking every single network packet in real time even on their widest links. Another benefit of an open source solution such as Snabbflow is its independence on the hardware of a single vendor. Snabb is deployed on commodity server hardware including server processors and network adapters from both AMD, Intel, and Mellanox.
Max Rottenkolber is a Developer at Igalia.
This interview is a part of The Fast Mode's Traffic Visibility segment, featuring leading networking, analytics and cybersecurity companies and their views on the importance of network intelligence and DPI for today's IP networks. A research report on this topic will be published in June 2024 - for more information, visit here.
