WireSpeed Packet Capture & Playback Tool

Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA – February 13, 2013- GL Communications Inc announced today its enhanced PacketExpert™ - An Ethernet/IP Testing Tool with WireSpeed Ethernet Packet Capture and Playback application.

Speaking to reporters, Mr. Jagdish Vadalia, Manager Product Development of the company said, “PacketExpert™ is a portable (USB based) Quad Port Ethernet / VLAN / MPLS / IP / UDP Tester with 4 Electrical (10/100/1000 Mbps) and 2 Optical Ports (1000 Mbps). Each GigE port provides independent thernet/VLAN/MPLS/IP/UDP testing at WireSpeed for applications such as BERT, RFC 2544, IP Link Simulation and Loopback.

Enhanced PacketExpert™ with Record/ Playback application is designed for (optical or electrical interfaces for up to 1 Gb/s) high-precision: WireSpeed Packet Filter, WireSpeed Packet Capture & Aggregation, WireSpeed Packet Traffic Generation.

The application supports WireSpeed filtering and capturing on multiple ports and traffic aggregation (packets filtered from multiple ports are aggregated as a single stream and saved to hard disk for offline analysis). PacketExpert™ with Record/ Playback application also supports WireSpeed multi-port transmission (playback) of recorded traffic with high precision reproduction of the recorded timestamps.”

He added, “Timestamp precision for file capture/playback is increased from Microsecond to Nanosecond. Now captured file will have the timestamp recorded in nanosecond precision. While playing back the file, the nanosecond timestamp recorded in the file is maintained for each packet. For both, the accuracy is maintained within 10s of nanoseconds.

Support for PCAP-NG (Next generation pcap) format has been added. This is the new format used by Wireshark. This new format supports important enhancements like nanosecond time resolution and interface information (like the captured port number).”

Mr.Vadalia further added, “Recording has been enhanced with the option for limited Lossless Capture/Continous Capture. In Lossless Capture, the recording stops automatically when the Onboard 2 GB buffer fills up. In Continous Capture, the recording continues even after the Onboard buffer is full with discontinuous recording indication.

Enhanced Playback application now supports the 'As per File" option. This option allows user to precisely regenerate the traffic from a pre recorded file i.e. traffic is transmitted at the precise rate at which it was captured (by maintaining the recorded timestamps). And the packets are sent out on the same port as they were captured.”

Applications

Capture WireSpeed traffic on multiple ports in the field for later offline analysis in the lab
Troubleshoot isolated network problems - get specific traffic from the total traffic by filtering the WireSpeed traffic and capturing only the traffic of interest. E.g. filter a single VoIP call out of thousands of VoIP calls, and capture traffic for that single VoIP call.
Precisely recreate real world traffic conditions in the lab using the playback feature. E.g.: Capture traffic for thousands of VoIP calls and recreate them in the lab.
Setup complex capture scenarios using the powerful and flexible filters. E.g. Capture only HTTP packets from a set of Source and Destination IP Addresses and reject all other packets.
Run long term capture of huge amount of data by filtering and lowering the traffic rate and continuously capturing. E.g. Filter/Capture all the traffic between 2 IP Addresses for 1 month. Applying the filter reduces the capture rate so that it can be transferred in real time to the host’s hard disk. The capture can run continuously as the captured data is stored on a file on the hard disk. The limitation for the capture in this case is the hard disk capacity itself.
Generate real world background (bursty and unpredictable) traffic to load switches/routers etc. while the actual test is running in the foreground. E.g. while running BERT/RFC 2544 testing on a switch/router, playback a real world captured traffic file on other ports to load the switch/router with realistic background traffic i.e.bursty and unpredictable traffic.

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