STAC Report: DRW Technologies NetRaptor Packet Capture Appliance

Without loss: captured 10Gbps on one port, sustained aggregate 1Gbps while handling 48 concurrent queries, tolerated line-rate bursts >1GB per port across multiple ports.

17 Jun 2013

DRW Technologies recently asked STAC to test the performance of their NetRaptor Packet Capture Appliance, a new product on the packet-capture scene. With some input from a major bank, we developed a few basic test specifications that could be applied to any capture appliance.

The tests measured the ability of NetRaptor to capture steady-state exchange data traffic, tolerate traffic bursts, and capture while responding to queries. We measured the maximum per-port and aggregate ingress rates, as well as the maximum sustained burst, for various numbers of ports.

NetRaptor was able to capture and persist network traffic on a single port at 10 gigabit line rate without dropping any packets. It sustained an aggregate ingress rate of 1Gbps while handling up to 48 concurrent queries, without dropping any packets. And it tolerated line-rate bursts of over 1GB to each port across multiple ports without dropping any packets.

The hardware in the testbed consisted of the NetRaptor v2.0 Network Traffic Monitor, a playback server with 2 Endace 9.2 cards, a Gigamon TAP-251 10GbE 50/50 optical tap and a Cisco 4948 1GbE switch for query traffic.

The report describes the test methodology and test-setup configuration and provides an analysis of the results. It is available to all subscribers.