Net Optics announced the release of xStream Family 4.1, a major upgrade to its innovative Network Packet Broker (NPB) solution.

All three products comprising the xStream Family now deliver much-desired High Availability (HA) capability to customer tools, a key benefit for networks under constant pressure for no-excuses, always-on performance.

Now customers can deploy fully redundant security and monitoring tools in both in-line and out-of-band configurations — even if those tools were not designed with high availability. In addition, Version 4.1 enables state synchronization for its load balancing solution, xBalancer.

The recently introduced xStream Family merges three of Net Optics’ most sophisticated products, which perform quick link aggregation, network packet brokering and advanced load balancing from a single convenient platform.

xStream Family Version 4.1 responds to customer needs by introducing new filter management profiles — increasing the maximum number of filters available in some configurations to 4,096. Device management capabilities and integration with third-party management solutions have been enhanced as well.

The new version further streamlines management, improves navigation, and simplifies large-scale tasks. Customer IT teams can now export network intelligence statistics and other information tables to Excel format from Web UI, manage configuration files from Web UI, perform image upgrade from files on the local client computer, create graphs from the Dashboard and Port Statistics tables, and more. Administrators can create charts for any columns and any port.

“We’re committed to advancing the leading edge with our Network Packet Broker solutions, including the xStream Family, to ensure that our customers can protect their networks, maintain superior performance and gain the full value of their tool investment,” said Sharon Besser, VP Technology at Net Optics. “We’re very pleased to enable customers to deploy even the most complex network monitoring and security solutions in a way that simplifies their IT challenges by integrating key functions onto one platform.”

Included in the xStream Family 4.1 Network Packet Broker solution:

- xBalancer is designed forhigh-volume, high-speed load-balancing in 1G and 10G networks—monitoring network traffic and cost-effectively preventing tool overburdening. xBalancer distributes the traffic to multiple monitoring tools, an efficient approach to optimizing current resources by sharing the load caused by processing high traffic volumes.

- Director xStream Data Monitoring Switch aggregates, regenerates, switches, filters, and load balances monitoring traffic. With the highest density of 10G ports, Director xStream empowers the NOC to share a pool of monitoring tools across a large number of network links.

- iLink Agg xStream Monitoring Link Aggregator combines traffic from as many as 20 network links or Span ports and sends it to four monitoring tools. It automatically performs all data-rate and media-type conversions, enabling 10G traffic to be sent to 1G appliances, and 1G traffic to 10G tools—protecting a company’s security appliance investment.