sFlow
sFlow, which stands for sampled flow, was originally developed by InMon (http://www.inmon.com) and later standardized by way of RFC. The current version is v5. Many in the industry believe the primary advantage of sFlow is its 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 for the network devices. sFlow's statistical sampling is integrated with the hardware and provides real-time, raw exports.
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 line of products, ...
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