cPacket Networks announced new features to its cClear platform that enable customers to improve monitoring and fault identification on 40Gbps and 100Gbps networks.

The new capabilities offer a wide range of customer benefits including:

- 40Gbps Encapsulated Remote Switch Port Analyzer (ERSPAN) Type III termination functionality

- Consistent timestamp extraction across network streams generated by third-party devices

- Dynamic truncation combined with new and advanced cSearch features will provide users with highly customizable visibility into the network

“As 40Gbps and 100Gbps networks become the new norm for large data centers, customers need to have the proper tools in place to prevent network downtime and increased operational costs,” said Brendan O’Flaherty, CEO at cPacket. “With our new set of features, we’ve extended our lead over packet broker and NPM providers that are still scaling their products for the basic needs of high-speed networks. Features such as ERSPAN termination, timestamping, and dynamic truncation have become essentials in the toolsets of network personnel challenged with harnessing network traffic.”

cPacket’s new features and benefits include:

- 40Gbps ERSPAN Type III Termination: cPacket devices can extract timestamps from ERSPAN packets with one-nanosecond accuracy. With the increase in traffic rates across the network, it is crucial to be able to deliver more traffic from more points in the network. This new feature allows users to terminate 40Gbps and 10Gbps ERSPAN connections, ultimately improving monitoring capabilities from edge to core to data center.

- Timestamp Extraction from Arista 7150 Series Switches: cPacket’s new feature enables customers with Arista 7150 Series switches to standardize timing with all monitoring tools and devices. It should be noted that due to its place in the network, cPacket’s cVu generates accurate timestamps and is considered one of the industry’s de facto standards for providing accurate timestamps.

- Special Action Filters and Dynamic Truncation: This new feature overcomes the challenges of selectively filtering traffic to perform additional processing on a case by case basis. cPacket’s unique Smart Filter technology allows full packet inspection of every byte in every packet in both the header and the payload at wirespeed. This ensures fully granular traffic pruning for performance monitoring and network troubleshooting. In addition, cPacket’s intelligent Dynamic Truncation feature removes TCP or UDP payloads while leaving the header intact. This feature is highly beneficial to cPacket’s customers in finance and healthcare who must remain compliant by removing Personally Identifiable Information (PII) while also retaining the important header information required for troubleshooting the network.

- cSearch – New and Improved: This highly sought-after feature allows customers to search the entire monitored network for a specific pattern and can be used to identify the location of network traffic matching specified profiles anywhere in the network, reducing troubleshooting time and improving security. In addition, with the 18.1.1 release, cSearch can be accessed and used from an external device via a RESTful API, enabling easier integration and automation.

These new features are available now as part of the new cPacket release.