cPacket Networks announced a network monitoring solution that provides wirespeed network monitoring at 100Gbps (100 gigabits per second) under all traffic conditions.

The new cPacket Cx4100 solution also monitors the network at the wire, virtually eliminating the risk of false positives or negatives, or of dropped packets — issues that afflict legacy systems, such as packet brokers and packet capture NICs, which both require backhauling of network traffic for analysis.

The Cx4100 benefits from cPacket’s distributed architecture design, which brings monitoring to multiple points throughout the network — where monitoring is most critical — unlike solutions that provide centralized monitoring.

The Cx4100 solution is geared to the needs of monitoring for compliance, capacity planning, and troubleshooting on high-speed networks. In fact, research by Infonetics predicts that 100Gbps will account for approximately two thirds of all bandwidth deployed in service provider networks by 2018. For service providers and enterprise data centers alike, engineers and network architects today need to monitor at 100Gbps for capacity planning, utilization, or regulatory compliance. Financial service firms, and firms in other highly regulated industries, also are under pressure to ensure regulatory compliance.

cPacket’s Cx4100 answers these industry challenges with a next-generation monitoring architecture that outperforms centralized legacy monitoring products by bringing intelligence directly to the wire, reducing latency, and eliminating false positives and negatives. Network engineers can now truly monitor 100G links at millisecond resolution, enabling true capacity planning and wirespeed packet KPIs, as well as meeting regulatory monitoring requirements. What’s more, the Cx4100 provides users distributed, scalable capture of selected packets of interest, speeding troubleshooting and further decreasing time-to-resolution.

In addition, cPacket’s Cx4100 provides:

- High-performance spike detection (millisecond speeds at up to a thousand feeds) even at 100Gbps through hardware analytics

- Four 100Gbps interfaces with all interfaces provide monitoring at wirespeed

- Nanosecond-precision timestamping, which is critical in regulated environments

- Automated load balancing from 100Gbps down to 10Gbps

“Wirespeed network visibility is becoming an increasing challenge both for enterprises and service providers,” said Jim Duffy, Senior Analyst, 451 Research. “100G networks are fast becoming the new norm, and existing monitoring systems can’t keep up. cPacket’s Cx4100 pinpoints the urgency for a fundamental shift away from tools that backhaul data in order to perform diagnostics on it.”

The Cx4100 is the newest member of cPacket’s Integrated Monitoring Fabric, which includes cStor forensic storage for online storage and analytics; and includes the SPIFEE management dashboard, which provides a single-pain-of-glass design for monitoring and managing 1Gbps up through 100Gbps networks. The dashboard allows users to scale monitoring without re-architecting the networking or requiring retraining. In addition, the Cx4100 incorporates RESTful APIs, which ensure quick integration with third-party automation solutions.

“There’s effectively a new acid test for managing high-speed networks,” said Brendan O’Flaherty, CEO of cPacket Networks, "and that is the need to monitor network behavior without questioning the integrity of the data. Industry has reached a juncture where existing solutions can’t deliver on that guarantee. That’s because backhauling traffic to monitor and diagnose issues would have to defy the laws of physics to deliver real-time performance.”

The cPacket Cx4100 will be available in the second quarter of 2017.