Colocation Solutions Featured Article

cPacket (News - Alert) Networks, a provider of chips and technologies incorporating the new Pervasive Network Intelligence technology, has announced to introduce its new, 320 Gigabit network appliance that provides a number of advanced capabilities for 32 10-gigabit links. These capabilities include complete packet inspection filtering, flexible traffic aggregation, selective duplication, flow-based load balancing, and granular, wire-speed performance monitoring.

Based upon the company’s unique, 20-gigabit “complete packet inspection” chips and Marvell’s (News - Alert) 10 Gigabit Prestera switch, the new device, named as the “cVu320G” offers a centralized-data-center 10-Gigabit monitoring solution. It also helps the data center, service provider, and telecommunication enterprises carry out on-demand capacity management, resource allocation, and real-time troubleshooting of bursts and spikes.

According to Rony Kay, president and chief technology pfficer at cPacket, today’s data centers are struggling with the growing stampede to 10 Gigabit and the increasing virtualization of platforms and services, as monitoring tools have not kept pace with these developments, and consequently the data centers are being overwhelmed with huge volumes of complex traffic, which they no longer have the visibility to control. As a result, the enterprises have to face various issues such as intermittent and frequent congestion, performance degradation, and major service disruptions to end users.

Kay noted that in order to improve and optimize the performance, enterprises have to focus upon effective network visibility, drill down, and real-time performance measurement, as although existing switch span ports and aggregation switches dutifully attempt to provide network access to monitoring tools, protocol analyzers, and intrusion detection systems, the impact on them is like drinking from a fire hose. Any early indicators and warning signs in the traffic that could trigger a proactive response are simply drowned in the flood, Kay added.

To resolve the issue and offer an efficient alternative to the enterprises, cPacket has integrated its proprietary, 20 Gigabit complete packet inspection chips and software along with Marvell Prestera CX 10 Gigabit switch, coupled with and a new hardware-software system architecture, into a 32-port, 3U rack-mountable appliance.

The device helps the users in simultaneously inspecting every bit in every packet at full line rate, on each of the 10 Gigabit ports, and automatically taking actions based upon what they observe. Additionally, the box can perform selective filtering, based upon any combination of header fields and payload content and forward that filtered traffic flow to any output port.

In November 2009, cPacket Networks introduced the world's first high-speed network probe, named the cTap Latency Probe or ‘cTapLP’, which is capable of delivering highly accurate, one way distributed latency and jitter measurements at sub-microsecond accuracy, for networks operating at 10 gigabits per seconds and beyond.