SMB IT | Curtis Franklin » Something for the SMB IT Toolbox: The Teeny Tap

July 19, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Something for the SMB IT Toolbox: The Teeny Tap

TAGS: SMB Hardware

Brian Chee, our happy geek in paradise, has long been a fan of Net Optics' network taps. He's used them for a number of our 10/100, gigabit and 10Gig switch tests.

In case you're wondering what a tap is, it's just a piece of network infrastructure monitoring hardware that plugs into active ports on the network allowing them to siphon off traffic to perform monitoring. Just what kind of traffic monitoring is dependent on the monitoring equipment that's attached to the tap.

Recently, we sub-contracted a monitoring assignment to another consultant and this guy showed up at the site with a Net Optics tap I hadn't seen before: The Teeny Tap.

It's called "the world's smallest tap" and they aren't kidding. It's about the size of one of those Linksys mini-hubs, but it's got way more smarts.

Again, this $345 device is designed to reliably send production traffic to a monitoring device, such that monitoring and analysis can be performed without any performance overhead. The Teeny Tap does this just as well as larger units, with the only caveat that it's 10/100-only. Other than that, it's got 4 monitoring ports, support for dual power inputs, and it works without an IP address.

For SMB consultants who run around doing a lot of network or security analysis, this is a darn handy little instrument.

Posted by Oliver Rist on July 19, 2006 10:19 AM

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