NIKSUN Announces New 10-Gigabit Ethernet Monitoring Solution

October 15, 2007 – NIKSUN®, Inc., the leading provider of real-time security surveillance, forensic analysis, compliance and performance monitoring solutions, is pleased to announce that its flagship products, NetVCR®, NetDetector®, NetVoice™ and NetBlackBox™ have been optimized for 10 Gigabit Ethernet Monitoring.

With 10 Gigabit Ethernet rapidly becoming affordable, it has emerged as the new standard for high-bandwidth enterprise networks. The adoption of this ultra-fast, super-capacity technology poses a very relevant and disturbing question to company CIOs: can my current performance monitoring and security architecture maintain the efficiency that we were accustomed to with such a remarkable increase of speed and capacity? With business-critical applications delivering services over the wire, latency, packet loss and a degradation of deep-packet inspection aren’t terms an enterprise can afford to hear. With PC based solutions struggling to cope with 10GbE performances, what is a CIO to do today? The option not to upgrade to 10Gb Ethernet simply because of the lack of a reliable monitoring solution is not an alternative an enterprise should have to deliberate.

The quest for an enterprise-class network-monitoring appliance is clamorous. It is essential. And with this NIKSUN release, this search ends today.

The Quest

The uninitiated might ask, what’s wrong with most current solutions anyway? The answer is quick but unembellished: interruptions. Even with multiple processors, computing power is decisively drained with the sheer number of read and write functions that exist during the process of packet capture within a high-speed network environment. Add to that the necessity to recognize a plethora of packet types, time-stamp and index them into a knowledge warehouse, and a bunch of simple processors no longer quite “byte the bits”. That’s when application performance suffers and those dreaded words come crashing back, reverberating in a CIO’s ear like the click-clack of a hacker’s keyboard making its way into the enterprise’s infospace: packet loss, latency, packet loss, latency.

For a monitoring security appliance to cope with 10GbE speeds quick is not the only term it needs to accommodate within its resume. Without precision the speed of packet capture is rendered meaningless. In order to build an intelligent warehouse there is a logic graph that needs to be traversed. It is absolutely mandatory to be able to correctly index each and every packet so that queries into the database can elaborate an unknown/unknown type situation to produce accurate results. Proper indexing ensures the what, where, why and how of a security breach or performance lag can be isolated and analyzed. If this was complex enough to accomplish with FastEthernet or Gigabit Ethernet line-rates, the task is further complicated in a 10GbE environment.

With the majority of solutions available today still wrestling the intricacies of high-speed, high-capacity networks, the search for an enterprise-class network appliance that effectively captures packets, alerts performance lags and security breaches while equipping a user with the ability to efficiently isolate and drill-down into problem areas for real-time analysis and forensics at 10GbE line-rates, ensues.

The Torch

The critical question arising at this juncture is, how does one overcome this problem? The answer that emerges is unwavering, like a torch illuminating the way across the 10 Gig tunnel: NikOS, the proprietary NIKSUN Operating System.

By developing enhanced Network Interface Cards in-house and reworking the FreeBSD kernel into purpose-specific operating and file systems that come together to form a unique storage subsystem, NIKSUN has optimized the process of packet capture and warehouse building. Taking advantage of multi-threading cores, NIKSUN maximizes the speed and density of throughput on a 10GbE network via an advanced Packet Analysis Engine that captures, indexes, stores and analyzes network traffic into the NIKSUN proprietary SFS file system and patent pending NIKSUN Knowledge Warehouse in real-time speeds that match 10 Gigabit Ethernet networks. Because of its unique file and operating systems, NIKSUN 10GbE solutions are able to efficiently divert basic CPU intensive functions like packet capture, indexing/time-stamping of packets and writing information to the NIKSUN knowledge warehouse from the CPU to the NIC itself. This enables CPUs to retain enough compute power to read and process queries initiated by a user, thus enabling real-time writing and processing of packet information.

The Pot of Gold

By engineering emerging processor and storage architectural standards into a purpose-specific network-monitoring appliance that overrides traditional limitations, NIKSUN provides a sound, reliable and actionable solution that ensures 100% real-time monitoring and faster time to detection and compliance, thus improving mean time to insight within a 10GbE environment. With its simplified, integrated platform, NIKSUN now extends its acclaimed performance and efficiency benchmarks into the 10GbE world, helping organizations to maintain quality oriented service delivery parameters in a modern ultra-speed network environment. Seamlessly harmonizing into forward-looking security risk management strategies, 10GbE optimization of the NIKSUN suite improves organizational efficiencies while maximizing return on investment.

NIKSUN supports bi-directional and uni-directional 10GbE monitoring for both Single Mode Fiber (SMF) and Multi Mode Fiber (MMF).

“With high bandwidth networks carrying heterogeneous information over the wire at blistering speeds, it is important for security providers to match solutions with enterprise thinking on the logic graph,” says Dr. Parag Pruthi, the CEO and Founder of NIKSUN. “That is what NIKSUN does best,” he reflects, with a modest smile. “We don’t just secure networks, we attend to customers and their businesses. We do what they need us to do, that’s most important,” he says, leaning over his desk to bring home his point, “that’s NIKSUN.”

NIKSUN has optimized its entire suite of solutions for 10GbE line-rates, including:

• NetVCR. The world’s first full-function appliance for advanced real-time network, service and application performance monitoring.
• NetDetector. An advanced network surveillance security appliance that provides anomaly and intrusion detection, inbound and outbound traffic protection, continuous traffic capture, data mining and archival, as well as fast drill-down and forensic analysis features.
• NetVoice. NIKSUN’s powerful voice-over-IP (VoIP) network management and security monitoring solution.
• NIKSUN NetBlackBox. The choice for companies that do not require all the features of NetVCR but still want the power of advanced real-time network, service and application performance monitoring.

For further information about NIKSUN products and our 10-Gigabit Ethernet monitoring solutions, please call 1-888-504-3336.

ABOUT NIKSUN, Inc.
NIKSUN is the recognized global leader in providing award-winning security, compliance and network performance management solutions. The company's powerful, flexible and scalable solutions deliver unprecedented insight in real time. NIKSUN, headquartered near Princeton, New Jersey, USA, has sales offices in major cities throughout the US, Europe and Asia Pacific. NIKSUN, NetVCR, NetDetector and NetDetectorLive are either registered trademarks or trademarks of NIKSUN, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries.