SCIENCE
Gigamon Solutions Enhance and Protect the Cyber Infrastructure of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications
Gigamon has been selected
by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) to deliver
powerful network visibility products for its ‘Blue Waters’ project. Gigamon’s
Intelligent Data Access Networking technology will enable researchers to
greatly enhance the scalability and security of their network infrastructure,
increasing their productivity and as a result, reduce the time required to
deliver breakthrough research.
The objective of the NCSA Blue Waters’ project is to deliver a supercomputer
capable of processing 1 quadrillion calculations per second (one petaflop). The
project is a combined effort between the National
Center for Supercomputing Applications
at the University
of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign, IBM and the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation.
The project is also supported by the National Science Foundation.
As the Blue Waters project progressed, the security team at NCSA realised their
existing technology would not support the higher speed 10Gbps network
connections required for the remote collaboration between the project
researchers. The team turned to Gigamon’s GigaVUE-2404 intelligent data access
switch to enable centralised monitoring for their higher performance network.
Using the GigaVUE solution as their cornerstone, the security team at NCSA
developed a robust monitoring architecture that allows them to aggregate
multiple 10Gbps connections between the border routers/WAN, balance the
aggregated traffic load, provide active failover, and replicate the traffic to
existing Bro IDS and Netflow tools, ensuring that all network traffic is
visible to the centralised security suite.
“With Gigamon appliances, NCSA is able to protect its cyber infrastructure to
best serve the researchers who use that cyber infrastructure to advance science
and engineering,” said Mike Dopheide, Security Engineer at NCSA.
“Gigamon is proud to have been selected for one of this nation’s most important
computing projects,” said Ted Ho, company Co-Founder and CEO. “Network
scalability, information security and data visibility are of the utmost
importance in advanced networking projects like Blue Waters, and this is
specifically why we created our Intelligent Data Access Networking Technology.”