cPacket extends its pervasive network visibility to branch offices and remote sites

Network intelligence, which historically targeted high-speed data centres, is now offered cost effectively for branch offices and remote sites.

  • Wednesday, 15th January 2014 Posted 10 years ago in by Phil Alsop

With the introduction of new members of the ground-breaking cVu product family of advanced traffic monitoring switches, cPacket expands its offering of network visibility, performance monitoring, and real-time analytics with entry models for branch offices and remote sites. Network operators responsible for the remote networks can now benefit from agile performance monitoring like their counterparts in the high-end data centres.
"In today's distributed IT environment, the productivity of branch offices and remote sites depends on flawless network operations for critical business activities," said Rony Kay, founder and CEO of cPacket Networks. "Operations teams are challenged to deliver high-quality user experiences in both remote sites and centralised data centres. To enable streamlined operations and agile performance management at remote sites, cPacket has extended the cVu product family with new entry models."


For example, the new cVu-16G is an advanced traffic monitoring switch with 16 interfaces in 1U form factor, built-in LCD display and redundant power supply. It combines cPacket's unique features of granular monitoring, performance visualisation, and proactive alerts with the functionality of common packet brokering and matrix forwarding. Additional unique features include real-time pattern search (grep) by inspecting every bit in every packet in every flow on-the-fly, dynamic flow balancing, tunnelled meshing, user-defined triggers, automatic microburst detection, and nanosecond time stamping. The physical interfaces of the cVu-16G are SFP transceivers, where two 10G interfaces can be used for transparent stacking to any other member of the cVu product family. To facilitate ease of deployment, cPacket offers entry mod els in a cost-effective package that includes premium features like snap capture, packet duplication, MPLS stripping, time stamping, and port tagging, as well as the SFP transceiver modules and optical tap strip.


These cVu entry models can connect seamlessly to cPacket's centralised dashboard called SPIFEE, which unifies the access to all the cVu devices in the entire corporate network - regardless of their physical locations. SPIFEE benefits the operations team with centralised access to visual key performance indicators (KPI), proactive alerts of undesired behaviours like spikes, and search for specific traffic profiles according to any combination of header fields and payload patterns (grep). This unique combination provides the most scalable real-time distributed monitoring solution in the market.


"Our new entry level models deliver unprecedented network visibility to teams that support branch offices and remote sites," said Kay. "While common packet brokering functionality is available also from other companies' products, no other solution delivers the unique benefits of integrated performance visualisation, proactive alerts, and interactive pattern search at line rate across a distributed infrastructure."