cPacket doubles the speed of its packet capture appliance

cPacket Networks this week launched a new appliance designed to capture network traffic and enable network operations teams to achieve better efficiency by monitoring network reliability in real time while also looking backward to investigate prior incidents.

Aimed at high-performance environments, cPacket’s Packet Capture cStor 200S appliance combines compute, storage, and networking in a single, compact device and delivers metrics for network throughput, capacity, latency, and errors. It can capture and analyze packets at a concurrent line rate of 200 Gbps, which is more than double the speed of cPacket’s 100S model. The new appliance includes features like fast querying, packet replay, and timestamping to enable advanced network analysis and troubleshooting. It’s targeted at customers that require high-speed packet capture, such as financial services companies and their e-trading applications.  

Enterprises need a network and security observability product built on accurate packet data, says Ron Nevo, cPacket CTO.

“The cStor 200S is a game-changer for high-speed network monitoring and analytics. By delivering 200 Gbps of sustained capture to disk (CTD), along with integrated indexing and analysis at that same line rate, we’re providing our customers – especially those in financial services – an unparalleled level of visibility and troubleshooting capabilities,” Nevo says. “The ability to quickly query and retrieve specific packets, even from days or weeks ago, is a huge advantage when dealing with security incidents or performance issues in these ultra-fast networks.”

cPacket

The 200S integrates packet indexing and analytics at the same 200 Gbps speed, unlike other products that separate packet capture and analytics, Nevo explains. This integrated approach saves on hardware and makes it easier for network engineers to correlate packets and analytics. Timestamping capabilities also make pinpointing problems and finding the cause easier for network operations teams, according to cPacket.

“It’s one thing to capture the packets, but then if you try to find them later, that can be pretty hard. Being able to index the packets accelerates the ability to find something that happened yesterday. If you want to correlate an event across two data centers, the time stamp will let you know when things happened and tell you they are related,” Nevo says.

High-performance environments require packet capture technology that can keep up, notes Sameh Boujelbene, vice president of ethernet switch data center market research at Dell’Oro Group.

“We anticipate that large enterprises will continue upgrading their data center networks from 100 Gbps to 400 Gbps in the coming years, while building additional infrastructure to support the growing demands of AI workloads. This creates an increasing need for packet capture technology that matches the speed, accuracy, and performance requirements of this high-performance environment,” Boujelbene said in a statement. “The cStor 200S helps address these changes in market requirements.”

Specific capabilities featured in the cStor 200S include:

• 200 Gbps concurrent capture-to-disk and analytics for observability and security monitoring in mission-critical enterprise networks.
• Solid state drives (SSD) are leveraged for their speed and reliability, ensuring that captured data is quickly and securely stored, including with self-encrypting drives.
• Line-rate indexing at 200 Gbps, enabling retrieval times of exactly the right packets to reduce mean-time-to-resolution.
• Scalability to adapt to growing enterprise needs, particularly as organizations transition to 100G and 400G networks.

The cStor 200S is installed around the firewalls in a customer environment, because the firewall throughput number provides a “good first approximation” of the traffic levels that need to be captured, cPacket says. Customer can also use the port speeds of their routers and switches as another data point to estimate the required number of cStor 200S devices. The cStor 200S is designed to upgrade or augment existing network traffic monitoring tools. cPacket’s Control Center, or cClear, provides a centralized dashboard interface for all cPacket devices deployed anywhere in a hybrid-cloud network, giving customers unified administration and management capabilities.

The cStor 200s is expected to be generally available in the fourth quarter of this year.