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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Breaking News - Security:
Hifn MeterFlow Meets Critical Needs Of Emerging Trends
Network security and flow classification market leader Hifn recently released
MeterFlow version 6.3, a flow classification software package that recognizes
and correlates data flows with their associated applications, which includes
visibility to a number of new application protocols that are targeted at
solving some of the current problems facing networking vendors.
Classic applications for incorporation of the MeterFlow technology are
performance management, including traffic shaping and class-based queuing;
firewall classification; SLA verification; billing and mediation systems to
account for individual subscriber activity; protocol/application level traffic
monitoring and analysis.
In addition to supporting Firewall ACL policies and IDS protocol anomaly
detection for security applications, some MeterFlow customers find the Hifn
technology useful for DiffServ QoS assignment and VJ header compression. Both
of these techniques can be used to ensure all critical voice and video content
is prioritized through bandwidth constricted and long-latency satellite or
wireless WAN connections in performance shaping or monitoring applications.
"This new version of MeterFlow is targeted at emerging applications that are
gaining the most attention and are growing the fastest in terms of network
capacity," said Mark Vondemkamp, product line director at Hifn Inc. "For
example, VOIP, streaming media, peer to peer networking protocols, and the
Instant Messenger category are those that require visibility whether it be
simply for filtering, service level monitoring or for instituting QOS
provisioning."
Version 7.0, to be released in the third calendar quarter of 2004, will add
full support for IPv6 stateful analysis classification. This means it will not
only recognize and classify IPv6 flows but also identify and correctly
classify those applications running over IPv6. Certain applications require
the adoption of IPv6 much earlier than others. For example, VOIP and wireless
networking equipment manufacturers are developing solutions that incorporate
IPv6 now. In other cases, network infrastructure devices are being implemented
with IPv4 and IPv6 capabilities and classifying and handling the traffic
differently may be desired.
MeterFlow's patented technology is used by OEMs to embellish their own
solutions and product offerings by offering greater visibility to more
application information thereby making the vendor solution more robust and
differentiated. Systems such as firewalls, NAT (Network Address Translation)
devices, intrusion detection systems and policy-based management tools can
benefit from the application-aware, deep packet classification information and
services that MeterFlow provides. Applications currently requiring specialized
equipment or being held back from wider Internet deployment due to a lack of
classification tools include teleconferencing, streaming media, VoIP and a
number of others that are precluded from passing through corporate firewalls.
MeterFlow returns stateful deep packet classification results in real time,
which means that it evaluates each and every packet while preserving context
information relative to the flow and to other packets. Unlike existing packet
classification technologies, MeterFlow extensively analyzes
application-specific data in real time, allowing it to determine the content
and identify the application of a single packet as well as the relationships
between packets. The method employed by MeterFlow allows it to follow
connection and transaction workflows utilized by the most complex protocols
and applications, such as H323, HTTP, SIP and RTSP.
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