MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--cPacket Networks has announced today it is placing in the public domain a new solution for accurate timestamping of high speed network traffic in real-time. This means that performance “hiccups” -- such as microbursts of latency or jitter -- can be identified immediately, and addressed before negatively impacting system performance. By placing this software solution in the public domain, cPacket is enabling data center operations, high frequency trading platforms, and application developers to benefit from real-time accurate timestamping in high speed networks, at no cost.
In today’s environment, high speed networks are at the heart of many organizations’ IT infrastructures. Data centers rely on these networks to deliver services and applications; high performance computing depends on them for scientific applications, complex simulations, medical research, and others; and financial organizations rely on very fast networks for high frequency trading. In the latter, a microsecond delay in trades can cause losses of millions of dollars. For such networks, accurate timestamping is a crucial component of network monitoring, to ensure a consistent quality of service, and to address performance problems in a timely manner.
Historically, software monitoring solutions have had to rely on timestamping by specialized network interface cards (NIC) in conjunction with span ports or aggregation taps. But timestamping at the NIC creates inherent inaccuracies caused by buffering, queuing, and random variations of span ports or aggregation before the data arrives at the NIC. These fundamental inaccuracies contaminate the upstream software analytics, becoming the root cause of misleading results, and results in less-than-optimal applications performance.
“Monitoring applications with existing solutions is like driving a car on a freeway with a broken speedometer, and then wondering why you are getting speeding tickets,” said Rony Kay, founder and CEO of cPacket. “Naturally, bad information can lead to bad outcomes.”
cPacket provides the most accurate real-time information by timestamping the applications data on the fly directly “at the wire,” before queuing, buffering, or aggregations can alter its timing behavior. The company’s new software enables users and application developers to seamlessly integrate such real-time timestamping into existing solutions, or into open source tools like Tcpdump, Wireshark, and n2disk. When used with hardware timestamping directly at the wire, this software enables any application to take full advantage of the most accurate inline timestamping in a standard format (including pcap, libcap, etc.). The standard format and seamless integration means no changes to the user’s application software are required.
cPacket makes this new software and driver available free of charge in the public domain to customers, application developers, other solution vendors, universities and the open source community.
“We are committed to leading the market in providing the best high speed network monitoring and analysis tools,” said Kay. “Introducing these new software utilities and making them freely available is part of this mission.”
The source code for the software is available now from cPacket at www.cpacket.com/tsutils. All cPacket solutions support this real-time timestamping.
About cPacket
cPacket Networks is the emerging leader in systems and technologies for Pervasive Network Intelligence. Utilizing its unique cPacket chip and software architecture, cPacket provides network monitoring and response solutions at a fraction of the complexity, power, and cost of preexisting approaches. The exploding use of 10 Gbps networks and beyond to support a relentless growth in media-centric applications, cloud applications, and data centers makes the availability of truly pervasive network intelligence timely and critical.
cPacket emerged from stealth mode in 2007 and is located in Mountain View, CA. For more information, visit www.cpacket.com.
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Additional background information is available at www.roeder-johnson.com.