Case Study

Case Study: Infrabel Gains Network Visibility

About Infrabel

Infrabel is responsible for managing the Belgian rail network and its traffic. The company focuses its efforts on managing traffic including passengers and freight; improving railway capacity by designing and building new infrastructure, maintaining and modernizing railway infrastructure; and setting prices, billing and collecting payments for the use of this infrastructure by railway undertakings operating on the Belgian network.

Streamline traffic and optimise monitoring tools

As networks begin to grow, gaining visibility becomes increasingly more difficult as there are more spots to monitor. With such an overwhelming amount of data to be collected, it is essential to be able to monitor the high bandwidth network with a low bandwidth tool. Applications only need specific types of traffic; therefore, a solution which can send only the needed packets to the device, such as filtering or packet slicing, is required. Modifying the packets by keeping just the packet header while stripping down the payload saves capacity on the network link. This allows for more visibility for the tools to process the packet, which will increase efficiency in the network.

Infrabel has one data centre with 40 Gb ports, and it was essential to streamline traffic to the monitoring tools while having complete packet visibility. The company needed visibility tools which could be deployed with the riverbed technology.

Lossless packet handling with Cubro NPBs

Infrabel floated tenders, as it is a mandatory requirement for the company, and selected Cubro EX32 and EX20400. Cubro products were also recommended to Infrabel by the reseller as being cost effective solutions. Cubro’s network packet brokers utilize filtering and packet slicing to reduce the amount of traffic being sent to monitoring appliances, which allows for more efficient traffic monitoring.

The company is currently using four EX32 and two EX20400. These are highly reliable network packet brokers which are designed for high speed and lossless packet handling. The Packetmasters aggregate, filter and load balance traffic, making monitoring tools more effective.

Cubro’s network packet brokers are used for Infrabel data centres with 40 Gb connections (EX20400 and EX32) and for two other data centres with 10 Gb connections (EX32). They are used primarily for filtering purpose. The company also had a customized requirement: they requested the addition of a stripping data packet application to one of the products, a request that Cubro was able to fulfil for the company in time because it could make a faster decision.

The outcome and business benefits

Optimized tool performance for greater return on investment and customized solution based on the requirement.

Cost Optimization
Increased Performance & Scalability
Improved Efficiency

Customer Review

“We are very satisfied with Cubro products. Cubro network packet brokers optimize tool performance for greater return on investment. Cubro’s technical support response rate was excellent. We were also able to get a product customized in time because Cubro was able to make a faster decision when we explained our requirements.” – Mr Lieven Stubbe, Infrabel

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