Cisco has released the Cisco NGA 3140 or NetFlow Generation Appliance which extends NetFlow abilities to switches that don’t support NetFlow or IPFIX. I didn’t find details on the cost however, I’m sure it will cost more than the nBox or the softflowd.
Cisco believes this appliance will help companies by:
- Providing End-to-end or hop by hop flow information collected across multiple network observation points using SPAN and network TAP (passive and active)
- Advanced filters to create custom exports for specific management needs
- It can forward flows to several collectors which means it has some NetFlow replication abilities
- Efficient design supporting up to six collectors for higher scalability and integration with multiple network management applications
Cisco markets that this new appliance will provide additional network performance details that can be fed into the Cisco Prime Assurance Manager. A high volume NetFlow collector might be necessary for some NGA customers.