Emulex Announces Next Generation of High Performance PCI Express 3.0 EndaceDAG Data Capture Cards for Network Monitoring Applications

EUROPEAN INFORMATION SECURITY SUMMIT 2014 – Emulex Corporation (NYSE:ELX), a leader in network connectivity, monitoring and management, today announced its next generation of EndaceDAG™ Data Capture Cards, which ensure 100 percent packet capture on any network, regardless of packet size, interface type or network load. The next generation EndaceDAG card portfolio includes new low-cost configurations that bring high performance data capture technology to markets which previously had to settle for less-capable data capture technology. The next generation EndaceDAG Data Capture Cards will come in base, standard and premium packages, allowing users in the government, high frequency trading (HFT), telecommunications, network and application performance management (NPM and APM) service provider, as well as security event information management (SEIM) markets to maximize the functional needs based on their application.

“Our EndaceDAG Cards have been providing consistent, reliable, high performance packet capture for more than a decade and are the best possible foundation for customers’ proprietary, internally developed network visibility solutions,” said Mike Riley, senior vice president and general manager of the Endace Division of Emulex. “These new offerings allow us to bring these capabilities to several new target markets to address a new class of customers with a solution that provides the 100 percent data capture and nanosecond-level timing accuracy that we are known for, but at a significantly lower price-point. The combination of the next generation EndaceDAG Cards for data capture and the new Emulex OneConnect® OCe14000 network interface card for server connectivity provide telecom customers with a best-in-breed solution for connecting and monitoring their networks.”

The next generation of EndaceDAG Data Capture Cards have extended features and capabilities that provide reliable, accurate timestamping for high-bandwidth enterprise network monitoring, including:

• Doubled Performance with PCI Express 3.0 Support: The next generation EndaceDAG Cards provide an 8-lane PCI Express 3.0 (PCIe) interface, allowing nearly twice the transfer rate of PCIe 2.0/2.1 interfaces and 40GbE wire-speed data capture with the forthcoming 40GbE upgrade kit for the quad-port EndaceDAG Card.
• Increased ROI with Precision Timing Protocol Support: Select configurations of the next generation EndaceDAG Cards will support the precision timing protocol (PTP), which is especially important for HFT markets where sub-microsecond timing accuracy is critical. PTP reduces costs associated with accurate timestamping by providing a common highly accurate time source at a fraction of the cost of specialized network time appliances (e.g. GPS receivers). EndaceDAG Cards will provide a dedicated 1Gb Ethernet (1GbE) port for PTP, eliminating the need to utilize one of the 10GbE data ports for PTP.
• Industry Leading Port Density Advantage: The next generation EndaceDAG Cards will be offered in both dual-port and quad-port 10GbE configurations. In addition, the dedicated PTP port effectively doubles port density and halves the price per port for HFT markets, resulting in a 2:1 port density advantage for customers using a dual-port card and a 4:1 port density advantage for customers using a quad-port card in PTP applications, when compared to data acquisition cards that do not provide a dedicated PTP port.
• Operational Expenditure (OPEX) Savings and Investment Protection with Open Architecture: Next generation EndaceDAG Cards are based on an “open systems” architecture, including open source (GPL) drivers, a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) based design, and EndaceDAG application programming interface (API). These capabilities provide investment protection by allowing users to customize systems designed around the next generation EndaceDAG Cards and leverage the work of other users in the open-source community to bring new features and functionality into their custom solutions.
• Highest Performance and Reliability: EndaceDAG Cards capture 100 percent of available network traffic from the wire, timestamped and transferred to host memory without loss and with no impact to live network traffic. By supporting a large number of receive streams, load balancing and timestamping of network data on every server, metrics can be collected and analyzed to ensure service provider performance, transaction usage and performance, and can make network key performance indicators (KPIs), such as network latency and packet loss more measureable and actionable. The ability to capture 100 percent of the network traffic transiting a link provides network organizations clear visibility to detect and investigate issues at the network packet-level, and lower time-to-resolution (TTR).

The next generation EndaceDAG Data Capture Cards will be available in three feature bundles (Premium, Standard, and Basic). These configurations will be available across a planned MSRP range of $4,450 to $14,950. This enables customers to leverage the market-leading performance and accuracy of EndaceDAG Cards in markets where they were previously cost-prohibitive. Key capabilities of the feature bundles include:

• Premium: The Premium configuration provides all of the features of our current-generation EndaceDAG Card and in addition, with a strong focus on supporting data capture for encapsulated protocols like GTP. In addition to supporting Ethernet protocols, the Premium configuration will support protocols such as GTP, IPinIP, and GRE as well as OC3/12/48/192 and 10GbE WAN protocols, and will support load-balancing and filtering across a variety of encapsulated protocols, making it an ideal capture solution for mobility markets. The Premium configuration also increases the number of RX/TX streams to 64 receive (RX) and 4 transmit (TX), with up to 64GB of memory per stream. Like the EndaceDAG Standard configuration, the Premium configuration also provides support for PTP and proprietary network packet broker (NPB) timing protocols. The Premium configuration will be offered in both dual- and quad-port 10GbE cards.
• Standard: The Standard configuration is an ideal solution for markets such as HFT, which require highly accurate time-stamping. This configuration provides the same RX/TX stream support and memory/stream capabilities as our current-generation EndaceDAG Card, and support for both PTP and proprietary NPB timing signals. It also supports load balancing including the ability to load balance across VLANs and MPLS, allowing multiple cards within a server to be coupled together. The Standard configuration will be available in dual-port and quad-port 10GbE cards.
• Basic: The Basic configuration provides basic data capture on 10GbE networks. It supports 16 RX and 2 TX streams, with up to 2GB of memory per stream with a maximum stream memory of 32GB. It will also provide the same load balancing capabilities as the Standard configuration. The Basic configuration will only be available as a dual-port 10GbE card.

As a part of the next generation EndaceDAG launch, Emulex is also launching the EndaceDAG beta program which will allow end users to start integrating the latest features in Endace’s data capture technology into their applications. Beta program participants will have early access to the hardware, software, open source drivers and EndaceDAG API during the evaluation period, as well as discounts on products, equipment and/or software upgrades. To learn more about the beta program, please visit our landing page here.

“The ability to capture and analyze network behavior for incident detection is becoming increasingly challenging for network and security operations staff that have upgraded to 10GbE and/or migrated to virtual, hybrid or cloud architectures,” said Bob Laliberte, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “The ability to collect and access packet-level data is critical to analyzing the root cause of network issues, however capturing all of the packets on high-speed networks can prove to be challenging. To help overcome these issues Emulex has introduced its next generation EndaceDAG Data Capture Cards, that offer a range of affordable configuration options for data visualization with minimal latency, regardless of packet size, interface type or network load.”

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Additional Resources:

• Read our Endace on Network Visibility blog on today’s news here.
• Learn more about next generation EndaceDAG Data Capture Card technology here.

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About Emulex

Emulex, a leader in network connectivity, monitoring and management, provides hardware and software solutions for global networks that support enterprise, cloud, government and telecommunications. Emulex’s products enable unrivaled end-to-end application visibility, optimization and acceleration. The Company's I/O connectivity offerings, including its line of ultra high-performance Ethernet and Fibre Channel-based connectivity products, have been designed into server and storage solutions from leading OEMs, including Cisco, Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, Huawei, IBM, NetApp and Oracle, and can be found in the data centers of nearly all of the Fortune 1000. Emulex’s monitoring and management solutions, including its portfolio of network visibility and recording products, provide organizations with complete network performance management at speeds up to 100Gb Ethernet. Emulex is headquartered in Costa Mesa, Calif., and has offices and research facilities in North America, Asia and Europe. For more information about Emulex (NYSE:ELX) please visit http://www.Emulex.com.

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