The Open Visibility Platform (OVP) is a network visibility architecture that combines a Network Packet Broker appliance with a Packetron acceleration hardware module. It functions as a central deployment hub for hosting third-party, proprietary, or custom virtualized security and monitoring applications directly within the visibility layer. The platform serves as an adaptation layer to consolidate network and security tools, using the Packetron module to offload performance-intensive utility processing tasks from connected appliances and ensure they receive traffic in specific formats.
The OVP operates on a "process-once, provide-many" methodology, centrally executing tasks such as decryption, de-duplication, and packet data conditioning up to Layer 7 before distributing the processed traffic to multiple tools. It utilizes policies, rules, utility process chaining, and trigger-based steering to establish optimized traffic flows and determine the logical delivery sequence. In addition to these capabilities, the platform performs standard Network Packet Broker functions including aggregation, replication, filtering, and load balancing for both out-of-band and inline deployments, while also managing host application failure and failover conditions through automated traffic steering.
