NetScout's nGenius 1500 Extends Pervasive Visibility Capabilities

IT organizations are increasingly leveraging valuable packet-flow data to support a wide range of management, compliance and security monitoring activities. To address these IT needs, unified service delivery management solutions provider NetScout (News - Alert) Systems, Inc. has released a high-performance, ultra-low latency network monitoring switch, nGenius 1500 series packet flow.

According to NetScout, the switch enables enterprise IT organizations and service providers to cost-effectively aggregate, filter and distribute network traffic to the nGenius Service Assurance Solution and other monitoring, compliance and security tools.

NetScout said that it is the first product resulting from its acquisition of Simena (News - Alert), LLC. Besides  further extending the pervasive visibility capabilities, the new nGenius 1500 series packet flow switch also strengthens the company’s Unified Service Delivery Management strategy by aggregating network traffic and distributing the right packet-flow data to the right monitoring tools at the right time, said NetScout.

According to NetScout, its entrance into the network monitoring switch market significantly changes the market landscape and empowers IT organizations to simplify and consolidate their network monitoring architecture with a single-vendor solution, thus reducing vendor complexity and leading to a lower total cost of ownership.

In a statement, Jonah Kowall, research director of IT Operations, Gartner (News - Alert) said, "Since it was established in 2003, the traffic monitoring switching market has been standalone, requiring customers to use alternate vendors for tooling and traffic visibility. These technologies are critical for the increasing need for packet data visibility to enable better utilization and a longer life for the monitoring and security tools that are connected to them, due to their ability to deliver a subset of the total traffic in an intelligent manner. With the new pressures to support increasing Ethernet capacities and traffic flows, Gartner expects traffic monitoring switches to be standard for many new 10 Gigabit Ethernet network architectures and we believe that it makes sense for performance management vendors to add this to their solution offerings," added Kowall.

NetScout said that the single rack unit (1 RU) device provides up to 24-ports of 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) with the industry's lowest sustained latency of 650 nanoseconds. Each of the 24-ports can also accommodate a 1 GbE connection through the use of small form-factor pluggable connectors (SFP), and can be dynamically configured for either incoming or outgoing traffic flows. A powerful 240 Gbps non-blocking switch fabric delivers layer 2-4 wire-speed intelligent packet filtering, port tagging and load balancing capabilities; all service options can be enabled simultaneously on each port with no performance impact, said the maker.

"Packet-flow data has been established as a rich and definitive source of network and application intelligence for a growing number of management applications, providing a granular window into service flows, interrelationships and the user experience," said Steven Shalita (News - Alert), vice president, marketing at NetScout. "With the introduction of the nGenius 1500 series packet flow switch, NetScout has taken a leadership position as the first established service management vendor to offer a network monitoring switch. Consequently, enterprise and service provider organizations can now look to a single vendor for a comprehensive and cost-effective access-to-analysis solution, resulting in a more efficient and simplified design of the monitoring environment. For IT organizations, this means reducing vendor complexity and simplifying support, while minimizing additional access-layer planning, procurement, and deployment activities, thus lowering the overall total cost of ownership," asserted Shalita.

NetScout said that the nGenius 1500 series packet flow switch is available now. And the 24-port 1 RU device offers a pay-as-you-grow configuration model where users can start with eight active ports and can activate additional ports in increments of four. Up to two devices can be clustered and managed as one switch and all advanced services and features are included as standard with no incremental costs.