Multi-vendor support

Multi-vendor support of the sFlow standard has been increasing rapidly over the last 5 years. Initially published by InMon Corp. as RFC 3176, sFlow has grown into the leading, multi-vendor, standard for monitoring high-speed switched networks. The growth in vendor support of sFlow has been driven by the move to 1G and more recently 10G Ethernet switches. The sFlow.org industry consortium, responsible for developing and promoting the sFlow standard, lists the large number of switches that implement sFlow. The switch vendors supporting sFlow now include: HP, IBM, Dell, Brocade, Juniper, BLADE, 3Com, H3C, Force10, Hitachi, AlaxalA, NEC, Alcatel-Lucent, D-Link, Extreme Networks, Allied Telesis and Comtec.

Broad vendor support delivers the network-wide visibility that is essential for managing the convergence of voice, data and storage on the campus and in the data center. It is likely that you have products from one or more of these vendors - if you would like more information on options to extend visibility in your network, ask them about sFlow.

September 11, 2012 Update: An updated version of this article describes the continued growth (nearly doubling) of sFlow support among vendors over the last couple of years, including Cisco's recent support for sFlow.