Ixia, a provider of network testing equipment, used the Interop event in Las Vegas to announce its purchase of Anue Systems, a developer of network visibility solutions used by the likes of Netflix.

The purchase has been agreed for US$145m cash and will close in Q2, 2012.

The timing couldn't have been better for announcement. Anue CTO Chip Webb presented Interop attendees with a run down on how Texas-based Anue is helping overcome some of the challenges with big data analysis only yesterday.

He explained how Anue's network monitoring switch, deployed by Netflix, carries out network analysis and how its ability to configure more than one rule at a time makes it stand out in the market.

"The problem with big data is it moves too fast, to places where it doesn't fit," Webb said.

"Engineers need to monitor the performance of the network, and make sure it is secure but there just aren't enough spam ports, or mirror ports, to allow you to hook a monitor up to your network for security purposes."

Anue's box sits between the tools on the network, where they can work in conjunction with the traditional network switch in the data center. From this location, Anue's solution can collect and share data between all tools on the network, providing greater monitoring of activity.

Webb said by using this switch, network managers can better provision for network activity. This is especially important for high-speed networks.

"As you progress up the tiers of the network, from access to aggregation, the data link capacity needs to increase by four to ten. In a small data center, if the servers have 1Gb ports, the aggregation links required will need to be ten times higher," Webb said.

"Advances in virtualization, cloud computing and media are driving port speeds from 1Gb to 10Gb up to 40Gb and 100Gb.

"One of the things out network monitoring switch does that is different to from every other piece of network equipment is it has been designed to configure more than one rule to fire at any one time. The problem of using an ordinary ether switch or router is typically that they will only make one decision and forward packets to Layer 2 andLayer 3."