Enterprise data centers continuously monitor network traffic to improve performance, provide better customer experience, and identify threats. All these appliances or tools require only a portion of the network payload to meet the monitoring requirements. Modern Network Packet brokers use “Packet truncation” technique to optimize the processing of network traffic which involves the removal of portions of network packets that are not needed for analysis.

Need for Packet Truncation

Reduce Storage: Network traffic payload can be very large (64 to 9216), and storing everything will be expensive. Packet truncation helps reduce the amount of data that needs to be stored by removing irrelevant or redundant information from packets.

Reduce CPU Cycles: Truncated packets require less processing to analyze, which can improve the overall speed and performance of the tools.

Simplify Analysis: Network administrators can easily identify network performance issues more quickly and efficiently since truncated packets have the relevant portions of the packet.

Improve Security: By removing sensitive information from the payload, security can be improved by limiting the exposure of confidential data.

Open Packet Broker for Truncation

Aviz Open Packet Broker industry first Packet broker solution built on Open Networking NOS SONiC supporting truncation on commodity ASICs supporting wire-speed packet truncation. Open Packet broker truncation has the following capabilities.

• Packet Truncation based on custom offsets (48 bytes to 4094 bytes).
• VLAN tag insertion for truncated packets for different tooling purposes.
• Load Balance across tools for optimal processing 

Packet Truncation or slicing will allow only the user-defined byte from an incoming packet, and the remaining bytes are discarded. This helps in reducing the quantity of data processed on the tool port.

Conclusion

Packet Truncation helps reduce storage requirements, improve analysis, speed up processing, and enhance network security. Open Packet Broker from Aviz Aviz OPB  improves cost savings by providing customers the choice of Open Networking HW SKUs supporting line-rate packet processing.

Authors: Chid Perumal, CTO, and Rajasekaran S, Member of Technical Staff, Aviz Networks