These boxes can switch massive bandwidth in a variety of configurations, change on the fly, and support header-based filtering as well.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [February 5, 2008]

Imagine a box with 20 ports, all of which can be connected any way you like, from 1 x 19 to 19 x 1 to 10 x 10. That's the product the founder imagined after he was fired from his previous business. By the time the box was built, it also could filter every packet based on header information (IP address, destination, etc.).

Background
Denny Miu, former UCLA professor and serial entrepreneur is brutally honest about his experience with the company he ran before he founded Gigamon. In a long blog post about the perils of accepting VC money and the telecom crash of 2000-2001, he accepts all the blame and seems grateful for a second chance. For example, he courageously writes, "I am convinced that mistakes I have made with VC's (eventually turning many of them into my worst enemies) were a result of my inexperience as a CEO compounded by a total lack of understanding of who VC's are and what they do for a living."

It's refreshing to talk to a CEO who hasn't gone through the type of media training every director of marketing, celebrity, and politician seem to acquire these days, generally to their own detriment.

Milpitas, Calif.-based Gigamon was founded in 2003 as a partnership, says its founder Denny Miu. He is the founder and he co-founded it with five others. The product was ready in 2004 and the company went public in 2005, when it first participated in Interop. Since then, over two and a half years, the company claims 1,000 units shipped and revenues of approximately $24 million.

Originally, Miu says, the idea was to build a cross connect for the enterprise, but now about half of all sales go to ISPs. "Nowadays, the telco is not that different from the enterprise," says Miu. Both have data centers with massive internal bandwidth.

Both need to monitor traffic. Even though all the Gigamon box does is inspect the traffic headers, that's enough for VoIP E911 and for IPTV and for CALEA, for any application that has to be up and for which the ISP needs real time QoS data.

"There are a multitude of applications with requirements for monitoring that didn't exist in 2000," notes Miu. "We were lucky to be in the right place at the right time. How do I explain our product to you? Let's think of our box as a managed gateway. In the data center, there are already two managed gateways there. One is between the LAN and WAN, the firewall (say, NetScreen). The other is the F5 load balancer."

The function of the junction
Gigamon products can fulfill a variety of functions. One common function is to deliver data to the multiple control and monitoring systems an ISP runs concurrently. For example, you could be delivering data from each of 16 servers to four different monitoring applications (VoIP, deep packet inspection, web analytics, and a response time monitor). The box is in a 16 x 4 configuration. It sends only the feeds that each tool needs (for example, it sends only VoIP packets to the VoIP measurement tool). If you add a fifth piece of monitoring software, change on the fly to a 15 x 5 configuration.

Or you could be connecting each of 10 servers to a triple redundant pipe in a 10 x 3 configuration, with several ports to spare.

Some ISPs are using one in each major distribution point in a city and others are putting one in each row in a data center, Miu says. "It's as if you move into a new home and you learn it's an old house with only one power socket in the kitchen, but you need to plug in your fridge, toaster, etc. Our product is like a power strip: plug it into the wall you have 7 outlets that your appliances can share. It's more than ensuring that your monitoring tools get used. Without it, different teams argue over who gets to use the available ports. The security team wants access but the database team needs it and the CALEA guy just got a subpoena. People are starting to see us as an essential part of the infrastructure like their firewall and load balancer."

Unusually, Miu then tells us who doesn't need his product. Most companies refuse to talk about this. "We're the interface. The world on the left is the network and the world on the right is your monitoring tools. If your network and monitoring are simple, you don't need it. I'll even go one step further. Let's suppose you have a very complex network but simple monitoring, say an IDS only, you still don't need us. We shine in a complex network with complex monitoring."

A key partner, Miu says, has been Santa Clara, Calif.-based measurement specialist Agilent, who has referred some of its VoIP measurement customers to Gigamon.

ISPs can sell measurement, Miu thinks. "If you're an online business and 10 percent of your customers drop out while using the shopping cart, you need to know that and you need to know why. 10 percent of 52 weeks is like shutting down your site for over one month!"

ISPs already know how to sell the security component of monitoring. ISPs are learning to sell compliance, whether it's Sarbanes-Oxley or any other recent law.

Of course, the box can also function as a basic switch operating at very high line rates.

Products, pricing, and availability
The GigaVUE has twenty 1 GigE ports. The GigaVUE 420, just announced, has four 10GigE ports and twenty 1 GigE ports. Extra packets are filtered or dropped.

Exact pricing was not disclosed but pricing for the GigaVUE averages about $24,000 per box.

The first year of support is included, and additional years cost 12 percent at the time of purchase or 15 percent after that. Miu says some U.S. companies are on a year-to-year budget whereas some Japanese companies prepay for five years of support.

—End