Thursday, 07 February 2013 15:25

Enterprises, governments, and service providers can achieve greater network visibility at lower cost

NASHUA, N.H. - NextComputing, developer of high-performance rackmount and portable data capture solutions, announces its first end-to-end solution for network packet capture, traffic monitoring, and analysis. Continuum PCAP is a high-speed network monitoring and capture system based on open-standards hardware and software. By building on familiar open-source tools, Continuum PCAP offers performance similar to more expensive capture systems, but at a lower cost.

The high cost of current network recording and analysis systems have limited these solutions to the higher budgets of large enterprises, service providers, and government agencies. Though these organizations can afford such systems, vendors typically allow only their own software to run on their appliances. There is a growing trend toward more open solutions that allow tools from different vendors to be used for different tasks. This has resulted in many IT professionals building their own systems, which can be fraught with integration and support issues.

Continuum PCAP solves these problems by combining a robust packet capture engine with popular open-source tools into a system that is open, flexible, and powerful. Built on a simple, browser-based user interface, Continuum PCAP enables high-speed recording of 1G and 10G networks, as well as packet analysis, intrusion detection, and real-time indexing. This solution is available in several form-factors with varying amounts of data storage, including rackmount and portable.

Key features include:

• Capture network traffic at line rates up to 7.5Gbps to industry-standard PCAP files
• Zero packet loss with time stamping of every packet
• Easy to use, browser-based user interface allows remote analysis and exporting of PCAP files
• Real-time indexing enables quick querying and extracting of data using time-based parameters
• Enable traffic-based alerts with SNORT
• Analyze PCAP files with Wireshark
• Integrate sophisticated 3rd party packet analysis tools using the open API
• Rack-based appliance with up to 64TB storage
• Portable appliance with up to 14TB storage
• Runs standard Linux operating system

"The rapid growth in IP-based communication has put enormous demands on enterprises, service providers, and governments to make sense of all the information coming across their networks. This influx of data brings opportunities to extract actionable intelligence, but also presents significant risks when these complex networks become difficult to manage and protect," says Bob Labadini, President and CTO of NextComputing.

"Continuum PCAP is not only a powerful packet capture tool on its own, but can be combined with other analysis and monitoring tools to solve problems in network performance management, incident response, and data forensics," continues Labadini. "We believe this type of solution not only appeals to companies looking to start capturing their network traffic, but also large organizations looking for more open tools, and software developers who want to cost-effectively add packet capture capabilities to their existing applications."

Continuum PCAP is available now from NextComputing. For more information and pricing, please email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or call +1-603-886-3874.