Deep Packet Capture and Playback Virtual Appliance
Leading deep packet capture and playback vendor first-to-market with software-only solution for widespread use
Solera Networks, a leading provider of lossless network packet capture and playback appliances, announced today the availability of the Solera Networks Virtual Appliance for Packet Capture™. In a market first, Solera Networks has now delivered its market-leading technology, based on open-standards, in a software-only, hardware-independent version. This move makes deep packet capture and playback available to every organization, regardless of size.
The virtual appliance comes with Solera Networks’ patented technology enabling lossless capture and playback of all network traffic. Several pre-configured storage capacities are available and designed to be flexible and inexpensive enough to allow every network to experience the advantages of deep packet capture, recording, storage and playback on demand.
“With this software-only version of our network appliance, Solera Networks has removed the need to rely on specialized hardware for deep packet capture and playback. Our virtual appliance retains our market-leading performance and stream-to-disk capability, giving our customers the best of both worlds—advanced packet capture with the flexibility to deploy it on hardware they may already have,” said Solera Networks Chairman and CTO, Bryan Sparks. “The value of root cause discovery of network events, using Solera Networks technology to see ‘back in time,’ is becoming more and more critical to customers seeking to augment their security and management obligations. This new virtual solution will help customers design, test, and implement network monitoring more quickly and more cost-effectively than ever.”
Now, customers have the ability to work with complete packet capture and playback technology without the hassle and expense associated with current proprietary hardware/software offerings.
“Solera Networks believes that just as firewalls have become a best practice over the past few years, lossless, deep packet capture, storage and playback of all network traffic will become a “best-practice” for all enterprises, whether for purposes of security, compliance, risk management, or network management,” said Steve Shillingford, COO for Solera Networks. “The only obstacle preventing the pervasive deployment of this capability has been the existing solutions’ proprietary and expensive designs, lack of performance, and lack of easy deployment.”
The Solera Networks virtual appliance can be downloaded over the internet and comes ready to use “out-of-box” on commodity hardware, including HP, Dell and other industry standard hardware. It can be implemented in any popular operating environment, including Unix and Windows environments, with a simple and intuitive setup wizard. And, because Solera Networks offers an open packet capture, storage and playback platform, customers can take advantage of full lossless packet capture capability in connection with literally hundreds of commercial, custom, and open-source networking tools for testing, traffic shaping, intrusion detection, and other packet analysis applications.
The Solera Networks Virtual Appliance for Packet Capture will include the generally-available features of the Solera Networks DS Appliance series. The package will be available in several versions and price points.
The Solera Networks virtual appliance will include the following features:
- Web-based management console
- Advanced capture and playback functionality, including near-instantaneous (1 millisecond) playback
- Full ingress/egress filtering capability on a myriad of variables (e.g., IP address, MAC address, protocol utilized (e.g., http, smtp, rtp, ftp, etc.), payload signatures, header, date, and time)
- REST-based API for integration by ISVs desiring to add deep packet capture capability into existing packet analysis applications
- Stream-to-disk capture capability for historical event root cause discovery and remediation
- 1 millisecond regeneration of captured packets for near real-time analysis of all network traffic without burdening the production network
Solera Networks is currently beta testing the Solera Networks Virtual Appliance for Packet Capture and expects it to be available via download before the end of Q2 2007.
Solera Networks’ high-performance packet capture, record and playback devices are capable of capturing, streaming and archiving all traffic on any network, up to 10 Gb. Captured traffic is written to a scalable, disk-based cache system and presented as a virtual file system which is accessible to any standard security, forensic, compliance, analytics or network management application. Those applications can then perform their analysis on either live or stored data, with the ability to throttle or accelerate traffic speeds and filter playback based on source/destination, protocol, time period and other variables.
Solera DS devices are rack mountable and support off-the-shelf disk storage and SAN solutions, attaching to the network via SPAN connections or network taps. A hardened SELinux platform and proprietary file system ensures security, while web-based administration, preconfigured hardware and an open architecture provides for simple plug-in and play deployment.. Detailed information can be found at http://www.soleranetworks.com/
