In our ongoing series of discussions about unique and compelling features that ANIC SmartNICs can provide, this week let’s talk about flow mapping. This is an interesting capability that can be used to segregate application traffic for inspection by different analytic tools.

Computer networks of course have a heterogenous mix of application traffic and often a network monitoring solution is deployed to analyze different aspects of the traffic. For example, suspicious traffic might be flagged and sent to a security analysis tool for further inspection. This might occur because after examining with DPI (deep packet inspection) software a previously unknown application might be traversing the network. Since this is the first time seeing this application type a further analysis is required to make sure it is legitimate. At the same time, streaming video traffic might need to be segregated to analyze its specific characteristics. The security tool and streaming video analysis tool are likely separate pieces of software running on different servers. So how do we efficiently segregate and forward traffic to the appropriate tool? This is where flow mapping comes in. With flow mapping a host DPI application can direct an ANIC SmartNIC to apply a unique VLAN tag to certain application flows (e.g. streaming video) and subsequently all flows with that specific VLAN tag will be forwarded to the appropriate analysis tool.

To learn more about how an ANIC SmartNIC can help with Flow Mapping or other needs, please contact us at [email protected].