NPB Application Overview

The NPB application provides functionality to process and prepare packets for visibility tools. This allows core networking devices to offload network monitoring.

When the Extreme 9920 running Extreme 9920 software is attached to optical taps between the core networking devices, a copy of the traffic is sent to the Extreme 9920 for filtering traffic of interest and formatting before being sent on to visibility tools.

The NPB application supports the following features:

• Aggregation: Aggregates traffic arriving from multiple ports and directs it to a single port or port-channel ("many to one").
• Replication: Replicates network traffic to multiple ports and port-channels ("one to many").
• Load balancing: Distributes network traffic among ports in a port-channel.
• ACL filtering: Directs network traffic based on Layer 2 to Layer 4 protocol headers.
• Route-map forwarding: Redirects packets based on Layer 2 to Layer 4 Protocol headers to the desired physical port or port-channel interfaces.
• Packet slicing: Truncates length of the packet to specified length.
• Tunnel origination or encapsulation: Encapsulates packets with IPv4 Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE) headers.
• Tunnel termination: Tunnel termination classifies and decapsulates incoming IPv4 packets.
• Encapsulation-header stripping:
  • Removes tags that are not supported by visibility applications.
  • Supports 802.1BR, VN-Tag, VLAN, VXLAN, GTPU, GRE, and IPIP headers.