Информационное Руководство для Cisco Cisco NetFlow Collector 6.0
Q&A
© 2008 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
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Cisco NetFlow Collector 6.0
General
Q.
What is Cisco
®
NetFlow Collector (NFC) 6.0?
A.
Cisco NFC 6.0 is a NetFlow data collection and aggregation tool that provides a centralized
view for data analysis and reporting. Cisco NFC empowers enterprises and service providers
with actionable intelligence to optimize their network infrastructure for application delivery and
network capacity planning. In addition, Cisco NFC is a critical enabler for business support
applications such as usage-based billing and service-level objective (SLO) monitoring. Cisco
NFC delivers industry-leading performance in helping enable network engineers to cope with
the high-volume flow data typical in large networks.
Q.
What are the differences between Cisco CNS NetFlow Collection Engine 5.0.3 and Cisco
NetFlow Collector 6.0?
A.
In addition to the change in name from Cisco CNS NetFlow Collection Engine (NFC 5.0.3) to
Cisco NetFlow Collector (NFC 6.0), the version 6 implements a scalable multitier architecture
for collecting, normalizing, correlating, and aggregating data from NetFlow-enabled devices
dispersed across geographically distributed networks. The architecture comprises two layers:
Cisco NFC as the first tier and Cisco Multi-NFC (MNFC) as the new tier-two component. Cisco
MNFC adds network-level correlation and time-based summarization providing a central view
for all distributed Cisco NFC implementations in the network. It provides end-to-end visibility
across different parts of the network. In other words, while Cisco NFC provides a close-up
view of the part of the network it monitors, Cisco MNFC provides a high-level, networkwide
view by collecting data from across many such NetFlow collectors. All traffic summarization
and configuration information is delivered through an advanced user-friendly Web interface.
Typically, Cisco MNFC is deployed at the administrative control point of the network as
illustrated in Figure 1.
Cisco NFC 6.0 is the replacement for Cisco NFC 5.0. Cisco NFC 6.0 is unmatched in handling
a large number of unique flows (unique flows per second), while simultaneously aggregating
granular data (1 minute aggregation period) from multiple aggregation schemes (key/value
combinations). In addition to supporting a large selection of predefined aggregation schemes,
Cisco NFC offers the flexibility for users to define their own aggregation schemes.