Data capture cards for network monitoring applications

“Our EndaceDAG Cards have been providing consistent, reliable, high performance packet capture for more than a decade and are the best possible foundation for customers’ proprietary, internally developed network visibility solutions,” said Mike Riley, senior vice president and general manager of the Endace Division of Emulex. “These new offerings allow us to bring these capabilities to several new target markets to address a new class of customers with a solution that provides the 100 per cent data capture and nanosecond-level timing accuracy that we are known for, but at a significantly lower price-point. The combination of the next generation EndaceDAG Cards for data capture and the new Emulex OneConnect® OCe14000 network interface card for server connectivity provide telecom customers with a best-in-breed solution for connecting and monitoring their networks.”

The next generation of EndaceDAG Data Capture Cards have extended features and capabilities that provide reliable, accurate time stamping for high-bandwidth enterprise network monitoring, including:
· Doubled Performance with PCI Express 3.0 Support: The next generation EndaceDAG Cards provide an 8-lane PCI Express 3.0 (PCIe) interface, allowing nearly twice the transfer rate of PCIe 2.0/2.1 interfaces and 40GbE wire-speed data capture with the forthcoming 40GbE upgrade kit for the quad-port EndaceDAG Card.
· Increased ROI with Precision Timing Protocol Support: Select configurations of the next generation EndaceDAG Cards will support the precision timing protocol (PTP), which is especially important for HFT markets where sub-microsecond timing accuracy is critical. PTP reduces costs associated with accurate time stamping by providing a common highly accurate time source at a fraction of the cost of specialised network time appliances (e.g. GPS receivers). EndaceDAG Cards will provide a dedicated 1Gb Ethernet (1GbE) port for PTP, eliminating the need to use one of the 10GbE data ports for PTP.
· Industry Leading Port Density Advantage: The next generation EndaceDAG Cards will be offered in both dual-port and quad-port 10GbE configurations. In addition, the dedicated PTP port effectively doubles port density and halves the price per port for HFT markets, resulting in a 2:1 port density advantage for customers using a dual-port card and a 4:1 port density advantage for customers using a quad-port card in PTP applications, when compared to data acquisition cards that do not provide a dedicated PTP port.
· Operational Expenditure (OPEX) Savings and Investment Protection with Open Architecture: Next generation EndaceDAG Cards are based on an “open systems” architecture, including open source (GPL) drivers, a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) based design, and EndaceDAG application programming interface (API). These capabilities provide investment protection by allowing users to customise systems designed around the next generation EndaceDAG Cards and leverage the work of other users in the open-source community to bring new features and functionality into their custom solutions.
· Highest Performance and Reliability: EndaceDAG Cards capture 100 per cent of available network traffic from the wire, time stamped and transferred to host memory without loss and with no impact to live network traffic. By supporting a large number of receive streams, load balancing and time stamping of network data on every server, metrics can be collected and analysed to ensure service provider performance, transaction usage and performance, and can make network key performance indicators (KPIs), such as network latency and packet loss more measureable and actionable. The ability to capture 100 per cent of the network traffic transiting a link provides network organisations clear visibility to detect and investigate issues at the network packet-level, and lower time-to-resolution (TTR).

The next generation EndaceDAG Data Capture Cards will be available in three feature bundles (Premium, Standard, and Basic). These configurations will be available across a planned MSRP range of $4,450 to $14,950. This enables customers to leverage the market-leading performance and accuracy of EndaceDAG Cards in markets where they were previously cost-prohibitive. Key capabilities of the feature bundles include:
· Premium: The Premium configuration provides all of the features of our current-generation EndaceDAG Card and in addition, with a strong focus on supporting data capture for encapsulated protocols like GTP. In addition to supporting Ethernet protocols, the Premium configuration and will support protocols such as GTP, IPinIP, and GRE as well as OC3/12/48/192 and 10GbE WAN protocols, and will support load-balancing and filtering across a variety of encapsulated protocols, making it an ideal capture solution for mobility markets. The Premium configuration also increases the number of RX/TX streams to 64 receive (RX) and 4 transmit (TX), with up to 64GB of memory per stream. Like the EndaceDAG Standard configuration, the Premium configuration also provides support for PTP and proprietary network packet broker (NPB) timing protocols. The Premium configuration will be offered in both dual- and quad-port 10GbE cards.
· Standard: The Standard configuration is an ideal solution for markets such as HFT, which require highly accurate time stamping. This configuration provides the same RX/TX stream support and memory/stream capabilities as our current-generation EndaceDAG Card, and support for both PTP and proprietary NPB timing signals. It also supports load balancing including the ability to load balance across VLANs and MPLS, allowing multiple cards within a server to be coupled together. The Standard configuration will be available in dual-port and quad-port 10GbE cards.
· Basic: The Basic configuration provides basic data capture on 10GbE networks. It supports 16 RX and 2 TX streams, with up to 2GB of memory per stream with a maximum stream memory of 32GB. It will also provide the same load balancing capabilities as the Standard configuration. The Basic configuration will only be available as a dual-port 10GbE card.

As a part of the next generation EndaceDAG launch, Emulex is also launching the EndaceDAG beta program which will allow end users to start integrating the latest features in Endace’s data capture technology into their applications. Beta program participants will have early access to the hardware, software, open source drivers and EndaceDAG API during the evaluation period, as well as discounts on products, equipment and/or software upgrades. To learn more about the beta program, please visit http://www.emulex.com/NextGenDAG.

“The ability to capture and analyse network behaviour for incident detection is becoming increasingly challenging for network and security operations staff that have upgraded to 10GbE and/or migrated to virtual, hybrid or cloud architectures,” said Bob Laliberte, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “The ability to collect and access packet -level data is critical to analysing the root cause of network issues, however capturing all of the packets on high-speed networks can prove to be challenging. To help overcome these issues Emulex has introduced its next generation EndaceDAG Data Capture Cards, that offer a range of affordable configuration options for data visualisation with minimal latency, regardless of packet size, interface type or network load.”