Network Instruments last week at Interop in New York unveiled its latest list of appliances, designed, the vendor says, to get ahead of the 10 Gigabit Ethernet market and help customers monitor those links with the speed and scale needed.

Douglas Smith, president and co-founder of Network Instruments, says customers began to ask for the added functionality in an effort to keep up with the evolving networks. Network Instruments competes with the likes of Fluke Networks and Network General in providing network managers with protocol analysis and other traffic monitoring tools. Smith says the 10 Gigabit Ethernet support within its Observer line and appliance family could be the first in the industry.

"Our larger customers are putting in 10 Gigabit Ethernet links, and they want the same look and feel of monitoring those links," he says.

According to the Dell'Oro Group, the market for 10 Gigabit Ethernet switching equipment reached $302 million in the second quarter of this year. At $302 million, revenue is on pace for more than a billion-dollar annual run rate, the research firm says.

The company announced with its 10 GbE appliance family that it has integrated support for the technology across its Observer products. Observer users typically install Observer software on a dedicated machine in their data center and distribute appliances at key locations to collect data. With Observer now supporting 10 Gigabit Ethernet, Smith says customers can get the expert analysis and real-time statistics for their higher speed links. The company designed a capture card, which runs within appliances, that ensures line-rate capture for 10 GbE and supports a "16-lane, PCI-Express environment," Smith says.

"This card enables the appliances to support about 40 Gigabit worth of data flow with 10 Gigabit full duplex. We collect the data, timestamp it and send it off to Observer," Smith says. "There is a lot of intelligence in the card. Not only do we do filtering, but we also track bandwidth utilization and spot top talkers, all at the card level."

Set to be available in October, Network Instruments' 10 GbE appliances start at about $47,500 for a portable unit.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.