ENGINEERING

nPulse Technologies, LLC has unveiled the new Dragonfly family of high-speed network sensors.

The first model, called Dragonfly FlowMeter is a flow-based network traffic probe for monitoring large-scale IP network traffic and activity at wire-speed. It is capable of capturing and processing up to 14.8 million packets per second on 10Gbps links, and generating Netflow v5, v9, and IPFIX flow records. Dragonfly is designed to interwork with existing network management and monitoring systems, and to extend their reach into network segments where cost or technology limitations prevented full visibility in the past.

Dragonfly is the result of joint development by nPulse and its partners in Europe and Asia.

"We have all been addressing similar customer problems, and drawing on the same open-source software and standards-based hardware-acceleration technologies to meet demanding requirements," said Peter Shaw, vice-president at nPulse. "We saw that there were cost and efficiency benefits, both to us and our customers, in aligning our efforts and standardizing on the Dragonfly architecture. Now we can quickly bring new models to market to solve tough, emerging network problems for network managers everywhere."

With the widespread acceptance of open-source monitoring tools, the Dragonfly Consortium members believe that the market is now ready for an affordable, commercially-supported alternative to expensive proprietary network sensors.