Cisco Cisco NetFlow Generation Appliance (NGA) 3240 White Paper

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White Paper

Redefine Network Visibility in the Data Center with
the Cisco NetFlow Generation Appliance

What You Will Learn

Modern data centers power businesses through a new generation of applications, service delivery solutions, and

hosting models. The number of applications is growing, application architecture is increasingly complex, workloads

are mobile, and traffic patterns are becoming difficult to predict. Virtualization, cloud computing, high-performance

computing, data warehousing, and disaster recovery strategies, among other factors prevalent in the current

environment, are prompting a whole new set of requirements for more detailed traffic visibility in data centers. The

modern data center is also demanding new techniques and best practices for managing network and application

delivery, helping ensure business continuity, and reducing any impact of failure scenarios on revenue streams.

The Cisco

NetFlow Generation Appliance (NGA) helps address these challenges.

Management Challenges

The increasing complexity of the data center is presenting numerous challenges to IT administrators:

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Security: Can I detect and thwart network security attacks and protect my business assets?

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Billing: How do I truly quantify the use of network resources for effective monetization?

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Troubleshooting: Are my business-critical applications getting the network resources they need to deliver

committed service levels? Are noncritical applications contending for resources and affecting the

performance of my business applications?

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Capacity planning: Do I have a good understanding of my network load and can I confidently plan for

growth? Can I align my IT investment and effectively support the business goals?

●

Resource optimization: Do I understand physical and virtual machine network traffic trends sufficiently to

help ensure efficient use of network resources? How do I effectively support workload mobility and take

advantage of my hybrid cloud deployment?

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Operations: How can I get 100 percent flow visibility without affecting network device performance? Can I

get end-to-end visibility across multiple network segments without requiring network reconfiguration?