This leaves a large gap between what a COTS platform can process and the amount of data coming through the circuits being monitored. Processing even a Gigabit of traffic in real-time, combined with filtering, combining streams from multiple links, and performing analysis has become an overwhelming undertaking for existing tools.
VSS Monitoring has a line of traffic capture devices capable of aggregating and filtering traffic from multiple sources, thereby alleviating the overhead normally required by these tools to perform inline filtering and freeing them up to perform their intended purposes. This means that tools that were originally designed to perform signaling analysis (e.g. H.323, SIP, H.248, SCCP, or NCS), media analysis (RTP, RTCP, RTCP-XR, or RTCP-HR), and video analysis (MPEG2-TS, HTTP streaming, etc.) can now monitor only the traffic of interest. This virtually eliminates the need for costly hardware capture cards with embedded network processors and it lets users purchase COTS platforms for these purposes, thus lowering the costs to the end-user and increasing the scalability of the tools being used.
Hardware-Based Filtering and selective aggregation are at the heart of VSS Monitoring’s Distributed Traffic Capture System™ (DTCS). Gigabit traffic capture devices such as the v12x4 offer both copper and fiber variants with selectable Input/Output monitor ports for increased port density. VSS also offers 10 GigE products like the v2x16, v4x24, and v24 that have an attractive entry price and do not force users into purchasing expensive chassis-based solutions, which require cards each time users wish to expand. Users can purchase only as many ports as they need and the units may be “daisy-chained” together to increase scalability beyond the number of ports in a single unit. Additionally, due to the focus on rack-density, VSS has incorporated newer, LC-type connectors to lower the footprint of each traffic capture device to a single rack unit. |
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Dedicated Hardware-Based Filtering Tools
 v8 Distributed Taps
CU
v12x4 Distributed Taps
CU / ZX / LX / SX / SFP
v16x8 Distributed Taps
CU / ZX / LX / SX / SFP
v24 Distributed Taps
ER / LR / SR / SFP / SFP+
v2x16 Distributed Taps
CU / ZX / LX / SX / XFP
v4x24 Distributed Taps
CU / ZX / LX / SX / XFP
v2x2 Distributed Taps
ER / LR / SR / XFP
v4x4 Distributed Taps
ER / LR / SR / XFP
v4x8 Distributed Taps
ER / LR / SR / XFP
v8x8 Distributed Taps
ER / LR / SR / XFP
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