Choosing between a SPAN, Aggregator, or full-duplex TAP
Chapter 2: Why choose a TAP or SPAN port 11
Cloning your SPAN/mirror port
You can still access your SPAN/mirror port even if all of your SPAN/mirror ports
on your switch are used. This is fairly common, and you can use a TAP to produce
two copies of the SPAN/mirror port.
By cloning a SPAN/mirror port you get the benefits of a duplicate copy of the
traffic and no security risk.
Figure 2: Cloning your SPAN/mirror port
Joining SPAN/mirror ports
If you have a primary switch and a failover switch, you can connect both of them
to the Aggregator TAP. Connect one of them to Link A and the other to Link B.
It does not matter whether the primary switch is connected to Link A or Link B,
and you do not need to know which one is “live.” The Aggregator TAP joins the
active and inactive SPAN/mirror port session together and sends the result to
the analyzer. Regardless which switch is primary, the Aggregator TAP sends the
SPAN/mirror port data from that switch to the analyzers.
