Gigabit Ethernet Recorder Full line-rate gigabit capture/playback with terabyte storage

By using specialized recording hardware, the Gigabit Ethernet Recorder offers full line-rate recording and playback. This would not be possible with ordinary network interface cards, which would suffer serious packet-loss already at low network utilization. The Gigabit Ethernet Recorder taps into the copper or optical line between two nodes, using a Gigabit Copper or Fibre tap module. This way the recorder is able to acquire all data that is sent between the two nodes. The recorder does not interfere with the traffic of the network that is being analyzed. The tap module can also be used when playing data back onto the target network. To store the vast amounts of information that is gathered by the Gigabit Ethernet Recorder, storage systems ranging from a few hundred Gigabytes to tens of Terabytes and beyond are available.

Customization Services
We can also offer to adapt and extend the functionality of the Gigabit Ethernet recorder, e.g. to utilize the available Coprocessor for selective filtering and to incorporate other protocols like ATM or AAL.

Commercial Grade PC-based Recorder
The Gigabit Ethernet Recorder is available in 2U or 4U industrial PC versions. All VMETRO Vortex products support standard commercial environmental specifications. The PC-based system offers semimobile equipment in a stand-alone unit, and provides access to low cost PCI based I/O and a Windows operating system.

Storage
VMETRO’s real-time recorders rely on arrays of state-of-the-art commercial disk drives as the permanent storage medium. The typical storage system has a storage capacity that ranges from Gigabytes up to Terabytes.

The storage subsystem is configured as JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks), SBOD (Switched Bunch of Disks) or RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) units. The JBOD solutions use highly reliable enterprise class disks with typical MTBF ratings of 1.2 million hours. The 4U industrial PC-based version offers internal storage, avoiding the need for external storage units.

Switched fabrics and Storage Area Networks are recommended for larger scale data recording environments and for dynamically linking several recorders, storage units and analysis stations. The key component in such a storage network is a Fibre Channel Switch that can be used to build non-blocking real-time storage configurations.

Control and Data Access
The Gigabit Ethernet Recorder is controlled via a web-based GUI or through a customer application by using XML-RPC. To speed up access to recorded data, a dedicated Fibre Channel link can be used directly between a workstation and the disk storage system, using VMETRO’s SAN Access Kit.

Real-Time File System
VMETRO’s range of recorders utilizes a file system with predictable real-time operation. The file system supports disk grouping (treating several disks as a single virtual device) and striping (spreading data across multiple disks in real-time). Striping data across multiple disks provides superior performance in very highspeed recording applications. This recording technique distributes data on several drives at once, thus resulting in much higher transfer rates to storage devices than is possible to a single disk. The disk grouping system is fully plug-and-play, as the recorder keeps the disk group information on all the drives. The disk group will be automatically reconstructed when moved to another host or recorder regardless of which order the drives are installed.