sFlow
sFlow, which stands for sampled flow, was originally developed by InMon (http://www.inmon.com) and later standardized by the way of RFC. The current version is v5. The primary advantage argued for sFlow is scalability. sFlow uses random one in n packets flow samples along with the polling interval of counter samples to derive an estimate of the traffic; this is less CPU-intensive than NetFlow. sFlow's statistical sampling is integrated with the hardware and provides real-time, raw export.
For scalability and competitive reasons, sFlow is generally preferred over NetFlow for newer vendors, such as Arista Networks, Vyatta, and A10 Networks. While Cisco supports sFlow on its Nexus 3000 platform, sFlow is generally not supported on Cisco ...
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