Gigamon Inc.

Bhanu Prathap Reddy Parlapalli

Anant Kumar

Qi Ming Ng

Ayyappa Nuthalapati

Andrew Mao

A network appliance deployed in a visibility fabric may intelligently drop certain low priority traffic to avoid indiscriminate dropping of data packets across all flow maps during periods of high congestion. More specifically, the network appliance may determine the data packets of a flow map should be dropped based on priority measures assigned on a per-flow map basis. Such a technique enables the network appliance to drop low priority traffic and forward high priority traffic downstream. Also introduced herein are techniques for metering traffic in order to gain better control over the traffic that is forwarded to an egress port of a network appliance. Because a network tool connected to the egress port can become easily overwhelmed, the network appliance may filter the traffic based on the priority of the flow maps to ensure that the network tool does not receive more traffic than can be handled.

Intelligent dropping of packets in a network visibility fabric

A network appliance described herein allows the user to selectively forward the flow of packets received through a network port, to a particular egress port. The network appliance creates virtual ports, which can be assigned to the one or more egress ports. The network appliance assigns the flow of packets to the one or more virtual ports in the network appliance. The network appliance decides a forwarding treatment to be applied to the flow of packets, for forwarding the flow of packets to the egress tool ports, based on the virtual port to which the flow of packets is assigned and based on a detected network characteristic. The forwarding treatment can be a decision to drop the flow of packets, or to send the flow of packets to the egress port assigned to the virtual port.

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Danville, CA, United States of America

Bhanu Prathap Reddy Parlapalli