Two vendors unveil traffic analyzers

Two traffic analyzer makers recently released products to help enterprise network managers better understand how traffic flows on their networks and how to use that information to improve performance.

Network Physics this week shipped a traffic flow monitor that the company says will help enterprise network managers optimize their infrastructure to support business applications.

The NP/BizFlow-2000 features a Business-Network Integration Engine, which company executives say will enable users to monitor all of the traffic flowing over a network and identify routing issues that could affect performance. Out-of-the-box and customizable rules enable network managers to relate specific traffic flows to specific applications, making it possible to speed the process of identifying who will be affected and resolving potential problems.

“[The appliance] can provide an explicit measure of performance, and network managers can take that response-time data and aggregate it in business-relevant ways,” says Bob Quillin, Network Physics’ vice president of marketing. 

The 1U appliance plugs in to a network and looks at all the traffic that travels across key aggregation points. A typical deployment would require two to four appliances. The average cost of an initial deployment could be between $100,000 and $200,000.

ClearSight Networks, formerly AppDancer, also made news in traffic analysis tools. The company last week announced its company re-launch, unveiled a suite of products, and made available two ClearSight Analyzer products. The Analyzer 10/100 and Analyzer Gigabit monitor IP traffic for network and application performance problems.

The software monitors network devices and various applications, including voice over IP. It can also provide a detailed view into the workings of many network applications. VoIP activity can be viewed at the call-control level – H.323 and Session Initiation Protocol are both supported – as well as at the Real-time Transport Protocol.

The ClearSight analyzer’s core component is software. As customers advance to ClearSight’s Full Duplex and Gigabit analyzers, the software is packaged on a portable hardware test tool. The company says it’s not an appliance in the standard sense, because it does not require rack mounting.

ClearSight Analyzer can be deployed on any PC system with Windows 2000, using most standard network interface cards. In the future, ClearSight Analyzer will also be deployable on common network management platforms, such as Solaris. Pricing for ClearSight Analyzer starts around $8,000.