Solera Networks announced the availability of its beta version of the free Solera V2P Tap, expanding the company’s initiative toward enabling complete network visibility. Using the Solera V2P Tap, organizations deploying virtual machines can now leverage their existing investments in network management and security tools by regenerating virtual network traffic, including intra-server virtual machine network traffic, to their existing physical security infrastructure to monitor and protect virtual network activity.

For many organizations, monitoring and securing the virtual environment means an additional investment to deploy security tools and processes in the virtual network—the same tools they already have in the physical environment. The Solera V2P Tap sits passively in a virtual environment leveraging VMware Vswitch technology, capturing all network traffic from within the virtual environment and regenerating all or some of that traffic in real-time to the physical environment for monitoring and analysis by existing tools.

“Having comprehensive network visibility is key to maintaining a secure network,” said Steve Shillingford, Solera Networks CEO. “Most organizations have invested significantly in their security and monitoring tools. Purchasing the same tools for their virtual environment is expensive and redundant. Having the only virtual appliance for capture and storage allowed us to offer this solution free of charge to organizations not interested in redundant expenses.”

The Solera V2P Tap allows organizations to utilize their existing intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDS/IPS), as well as other standard security tools to analyze traffic between virtual machines. While originating from the virtual infrastructure, traffic that is regenerated to these security systems appears as any other network traffic and can therefore be analyzed using the same procedures. The virtual tap also runs very efficiently, with minimal CPU utilization. This is particularly important in virtual environments where the objective is to get the most out of processor capacity and minimize hardware cost.

"Virtual security is as important as real security,” said Joe Levy, CTO of network security vendor, SonicWALL. “Until now, virtualization security required redundant expenses and resource utilization. Solera V2P Tap bridges the gap between the virtual and physical network, allowing administrators to use their existing purpose-built inspection platforms within the virtual network. Solera Networks is uniquely positioned to bring such capture and regeneration technologies to market. It’s a welcome efficiency for the industry."

The free download of the Solera V2P Tap is now available in beta for evaluation. After completion of the beta, the download will continue to be available for free. For more information on the virtual tap and to register for the download visit: www.soleranetworks.com/virtualtap.