In an age when television commercials show everyday people effortlessly accessing their bank account’s information from a street corner by way of a cellphone, it is ironic that accessing data flowing within its physical source – the network – is, without advanced preparation, nearly impossible. The truth is that for many IT organizations the network itself has become an impenetrable black box. In the rush to boost network speeds, most companies have migrated from token ring or other peer-to-peer topologies to switched networks such as Local Area Networks (LANs) and Storage Area Networks (SANs). While the new technology has yielded the desired result, increased speed, it has made access to the data flowing through connections within the network more difficult. Unlike peer-to-peer networks with their centralized data flows, where access is a simple matter of acquiring data as a peer node, switched networks have a decentralized structure with no ready access points. So, when network problems or slowdowns occur, or when monitoring becomes desirable, administrators often do not have the necessary access to network data flows to diagnose their problems or to monitor. This paper discusses one of the simplest, most-effective, and cost efficient ways to gain access to the data within switched networks, the Traffic Access Port (TAP).

Reprinted with Permission from www.finisar.com