Fiber Optic Network Tapping and Monitoring

Wirespeed Capture & Playback for Optical Interfaces with SonetExpert™

The SonetExpert™ Unchannelized Analyzer Record Playback module permits

• wirespeed packet capture and transmit over up to 2 unchannelized optical interfaces (up to 1 Gbps) 
• continuous simultaneous capture and playback over multiple ports on multiple devices is possible

Record to File Application

• Capture on both ports simultaneously to a file on hard disk in GL's proprietary HDL format
• Capture PoS traffic (PPP packets), ATM traffic (ATM cells), or Raw SONET/SDH traffic (Raw SONET/SDH frames)
• Multiple Versatile filters (e.g PPP, IP, UDP etc for PoS, VPI, VCI and other ATM Header fields for ATM) can be applied for incoming PoS/ATM traffic to capture traffic of interest. Up to 16 hardware filters can be applied to each port. Hardware filters work at wire speed
• Hardware timestamping of captured traffic
• Onboard 8GB of DDR3 RAM memory to temporarily store the captured traffic before transferring it to the PC. Out of this 8GB, 4GB is used for the Record application and 4GB for the Playback application
• Capture based on different criteria - Size, Number of frames etc
• Split capture into multiple files, for easy handling of small size files
• Multiple Record instances supported in parallel
  
  

Playback from File Application

• Playback from file (previously captured file) on both ports simultaneously
• Playback PoS traffic (PPP packets), ATM traffic (ATM cells), or Raw SONET/SDH traffic (Raw SONET/SDH frames)
• Playback on the same ports as captured, or playback on User selected ports
• One shot playback - stop playback once end of file is reached, or Continuous playback - start over from the beginning once end of file is reached
• Playback specified number of frames only and stop
• Supports multiple playback instances in parallel, but only when multiple devices are connected. For example, one instance can playback on one device, while another instance can playback on another device

Wirespeed Packet Capture, Filtering, and Playback with PacketExpert™

GL’s PacketExpert™- Record Playback module is designed for High-Precision Wirespeed Packet Forwarding and Wirespeed Packet Capture, Filter, Drop (for real-time analysis) & Storage (for offline analysis) over optical or electrical interfaces.

• Simultaneously Capture, Filter, and Record on up to 2 optical ports and 3 electrical ports (up to 1 Gbps) per device
• Continuously Playback packets  using pre-recorded files simultaneously up to 2 optical ports and 3 electrical ports per device
• Onboard 2 GB memory - Record and Playback utilises 1 GB each of the 2 GB on board memory available as a temporary buffer. Utilizing the onboard 2 GB memory and the WireSpeed filter, users can capture useful amounts of data at wire speed (up to 1 Gbps), which can be used for later analysis

Record to File Application

• Continuous or limited capture of Ethernet packets on up to 2 optical ports and 3 electrical ports (up to 1 Gbps) per device
• The captured packets are transferred to the host via the USB 2.0 interface at run time and stored on the host PC’s hard disk
• The capture can either run continuously or be limited to a specified file size (MB), number of packets, or specified time duration

• Wirespeed Packet Filters and Triggers - powerful “Wirespeed filter” allows user to filter out unwanted traffic, and continuously capture the traffic of interest. The limitation being only the hard disk size and the disk write speed

  • Record Only - Sixteen 40 byte independent filters with bit masks, with AND/OR include/exclude conditions
  • Record and Playback -  Sixteen 16 byte independent filters with bit masks, with AND/OR include/exclude conditions

Playback from File Application

High-precision Wirespeed Ethernet Packet Forwarding from a Captured File

This application permits regenerating the traffic from a pre-recorded file i.e. traffic is transmitted at the precise rate at which it was captured. Most important feature of the playback application is that the traffic can be played back exactly the same way as it was captured. During playback, the relative timestamps for each packet transmitted is maintained exactly the way in the source file, maintaining a nanosecond accuracy in the timestamps.

• Supports limited lossless capture and continuous capture modes
• The transmission can be either continuous or limited to a specified number of packets or be set to play the file till the end-of-file
• Supports popular capture file formats such as PCAP/NGPCAP (Wireshark® formats), and HDL (.hdl - GL Proprietary and can be used for offline analysis by GL’s PacketScan™)  for playback that gives the user flexibility in recreating live network conditions – traffic captured on a live network (using either PacketScan™ or Wireshark®) can be easily recreated in the lab