Frequently asked questions

IntellaView

Does your chassis have the ability to still pass traffic if one or more controller cards fail?

Yes – The IntellaView chassis separates the control plane from the data plane, allowing all traffic to continue to pass through the line cards to the tools.

What is the largest Deduplication incremental pool you support?

The 36-Port Multi-Function Blade with the mezzanine card allows for customers to have up to (2) 200Gbps Deduplication pools, which will allow for more ports to be included in one pool to look for and remove duplicates. Most of the industry supports 100Gbps incremental pools so, in situations where Deduplication is needed for large port aggregation, the E36-2 card will perform the job.

Can you support shared ports even with Deduplication?

Yes – we give customers the ability to deduplicate traffic for a connection and then skip Deduplication on that same port on another connection.

Can you perform services like Protocol (Header) Stripping, Packet Slicing, and Port Tagging per port at line rate?

Yes – we can support full line rate per port for these services on our multifunction blades.

Can you group ports, IP addresses, and application ports?

Yes – we provides customers the ability to group the following to be used in a filter:

APCON Ports – group ports and apply in a filter
VLANs
Addresses / CIDR Blocks
TCP / UDP Ports

Do you support re-hashing only the port that goes down in a load balance group, as opposed to all ports being re-hashed?

Yes – There are monitoring solutions that do not work well with all ports being rehashed when a port goes down. IntellaView only rehashes the traffic that was going to the port that went down to the other ports still active in the load balance group.

Can IntellaView manage multiple chassis from one GUI interface?

Yes – the IntellaView GUI can manage up to 5 switches at this time with more on the horizon. When you want to switch to another APCON switch, you select the switch and APCON will utilize the credentials already used and log you in. To manage more than 5 switches, you can utilize our TITAN multi-switch software.

Can IntellaView blades support 1G, 10G, 25G, 40G, and 100G interfaces on one line card?

Yes – The E52 Line card supports these speeds. The 52-Port Multi-Function Blade comes with (48) 1G, 10G, and 25G ports and (4) 40G / 100G Ports that can be converted to breakout mode.

Does IntellaView support virtual environment traffic?

Yes – APCON can ingest traffic from any virtual environment that supports Tunneling. Both the 36-Port Multi-Function Blade and 52-Port Multi-Function Blade, along with the IntellaView EdgeSwitch, support Tunneling.

When should I consider IntellaView over IntellaFlex XR series chassis?

If you are implementing many 40G / 100G connections from your network and tools, or need to maximize throughput, IntellaView would be your better option. IntellaFlex XR is best suited for environments where many 1G and 10G networks (and some 40G) exist.

Can you support multiple filter operations in one connection?

Yes – IntellaView was built to enhance customer capabilities to not only create rules, but to also group them into stacks and apply them to their connections.

Do I have the ability to backup or clone configurations from one switch to another?

Yes – You can back up your chassis configuration and all your connections, rules, and stacks in IntellaView GUI or in TITAN. IntellaView Advanced supports cloning your Lists, ACL Rules, ACL Stacks, and Load Balance Group configurations to other IntellaView chassis. In TITAN, you can also clone your chassis configurations and filters.

How many ports can you support in a chassis?

The 36-Port Multi-Function Blade has (36) 40G / 100G ports. If you were to use breakout on all ports, you could have up to 144 ports available. The 52-Port Multi-Function Blade supports (48) 1G, 10G, and 25G ports with (4) 40G / 100G ports available. Those ports support breakout, so you can have a total of 64 ports available. In our 8-slot chassis, you have the option to configure up to 1,152 ports.

Do I have any ability to provide SFP alerts on power and signal loss?

Yes – You can click on a port and view, edit, or delete your port configuration as well as view your SFP health for signal, power, and vendor for SFPs you have in the system.

Does your chassis support N+1 High availability?

Yes – IntellaView chassis support the N+1 rule for power, fan, and controller cards.

Does APCON provide APIs for creating scripts to perform specific operations?

We provide customers the ability to use the command line to run commands or utilize both REST API and CLI in scripts.

Do you have the ability to extract ERSPAN header information and insert it in the packet going to the tool?

One of the most difficult things to do in forensic analysis or when you are troubleshooting an issue on the network is to know where the packets came from. If you have a very large network and are using taps or SPANS, it can be difficult to trace in an ACI Leaf-Spine architecture. APCON inspects the packet, identifies there is a VLAN ID in the ERSPAN header, and adds it to the packet so when it gets to your tool, you know where in your network that packet came from.

Can your switches provide alerts?

APCON can provide alerts locally in the APCON GUI or use SNMPv2 and 3 and SYSLOG.

Are APCON’s solutions compatible with my current network and security tools?

APCON is “tool agnostic.” We deliver network traffic to existing security or performance solutions from industry leaders like SolarWinds, Tenable, ExtraHop, Viavi, Riverbed, Alien Vault, and Thousand Eyes.

Does APCON have solutions that support Private / Public Cloud environments?

Our IntellaCloud for AWS monitoring is a cloud-native visibility solution that captures, optimizes, and delivers cloud traffic to anywhere within a hybrid visibility fabric, significantly increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of your existing security, analytics, and performance monitoring tools.

We have a large traffic volume that needs VxLAN Protocol (Header) Stripping and Packet Deduplication in our spine and leaf network architecture. Capacity and performance are critical to us. What is the maximum throughput the IntellaView systems can handle?

Our 9RU IntellaView system supports up to 28.8Tbps Protocol (Header) Stripping and 3.2Tbps Packet Deduplication processing. Our 5RU IntellaView system supports up to 14.4Tbps and 1.6Tbps, respectively.

Do you support distributed or centralized monitoring architecture?

Unlike others who need to rely on distributed architecture to scale up their platforms, APCON supports distributed and centralized monitoring architectures. Deem where it fits. The IntellaView EdgeSwitch can connect to the Core for distributed architecture to scale up and ease the cabling challenges. On the other hand, APCON’s high throughput backplane in the IntellaView systems provides unsurpassed capacity and performance for the most demanding needs. It serves exceptionally well as a centralized monitoring platform.

Do APCON systems support 40G and 100G BiDi?

Yes – Both IntellaView and IntellaFlex XR systems support 40G and 100G BiDi. Our IntellaView systems can even configure ports for Rx-Only to ensure there are no issues when connecting to the BiDi TAPs as the 40G / 100G BiDi QSFP doesn't have this Rx-Only capability.

Our monitoring is critical. Are your systems built with high availability?

IntellaView and IntellaFlex XR are built with automatic fail-over redundant controllers to support high availability. Besides, our architectures separate the data plane and control plane. Unlike others where the filters or the monitoring connections will fail, APCON's filters and monitoring connections will stay intact even when both controllers fail.

Do you have any solution for remote locations or branch offices?

Our IntellaFlex XR IntellaStore II+ system provides an all-in-one solution that supports network packet broker functions, packet captures, and platform with build-in monitoring tools, including Wireshark and ntop. It supports the installation of other 3rd party monitoring applications. Besides, it supports GRE Tunnel Initiation such that you can send your aggregated monitoring traffic back to your data center, where your primary monitoring tools are located.