Benefits of Flexible Inline Arrangements

Flexible inline arrangements offer flexibility in how traffic is guided through inline tools. It has the following benefits compared to classic inline bypass:

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Guides traffic through any arbitrary sequence of inspection tools.

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Shares inline tools across multiple inline network links and across multiple inline maps.

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Distributes traffic across multiple tools to meet bandwidth and throughput demands.

Flexible inline arrangements use the same software constructs as the classic inline bypass solution, such as inline network, inline tool, and inline tool group. However, inline network group and inline serial constructs are not needed.

Inline network groups have changed with flexible inline arrangements. Now every inline network is independent and can share any combination of tools in any order. The concept of inline network group is supported by creating multiple flexible inline maps. Also, multiple inline networks can be grouped into an inline network bundle. You can configure one inline map for the network bundle with the inline network bundle as the source leader in a bidirectional clock relationship (formerly master).

Inline serial is not needed because the flexibility offered with flexible inline arrangements allows for the same configuration without the inline serial construct.

Figure 1 Flexible Inline Arrangements Scenario illustrates the benefits of flexible inline arrangements by showing the kinds of deployment scenarios that can be enabled with this approach.