Gigamon Inc.

Qi Ming Ng

Ning Wang

Shehzad Merchant

Bhanu Prathap Reddy Parlapalli

Ayyappa Nuthalapati

Andrew Mao

Hung Phi Nguyen

Attila J Hunyady

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.

Selectively forwarding flow of packets in a network appliance

A network switch apparatus, includes: a network port configured to receive a packet; instrument ports configured to communicate with respective network monitoring instruments; a packet duplication module configured to copy the packet to provide multiple packets that are identical to each other: a tagging module configured to tag the multiple packets with different respective identifiers to obtain tagged packets; and a processing unit coupled to the instrument ports; wherein the processing unit is configured to determine whether a first one of the tagged packets satisfies a first criterion, whether a second one of the tagged packets satisfies a second criterion, process the first one of the tagged packets in a first manner if the first one of the tagged packets satisfies the first criterion, and process the second one of the tagged packets in a second manner if the second one of the tagged packets satisfies the second criterion.

Systems and methods for processing packets

A network switch apparatus, includes: a network port configured to receive a packet; instrument ports configured to communicate with respective network monitoring instruments; a packet duplication module configured to copy the packet to provide multiple packets that are identical to each other; a tagging module configured to tag the multiple packets with different respective identifiers to obtain tagged packets; and a processing unit coupled to the instrument ports; wherein the processing unit is configured to determine whether a first one of the tagged packets satisfies a first criterion, whether a second one of the tagged packets satisfies a second criterion, process the first one of the tagged packets in a first manner if the first one of the tagged packets satisfies the first criterion, and process the second one of the tagged packets in a second manner if the second one of the tagged packets satisfies the second criterion.

A method of configuring a network component includes providing a plurality of templates, each of which is selectable for configuring the network component, wherein each of the templates has a set of available attributes associated thereto and includes a plurality of entry groups, each of the entry groups including a plurality of entries for allowing network processing rules that involve one or more of the attributes to be entered. The method also includes receiving an input regarding a desired attribute to be considered in a network process, and selecting one of the templates for configuring the network component based on the received input, wherein the act of selecting is performed automatically using a processor.

Growing community of inventors

Santa Clara, CA, United States of America

Qi Ming Ng