BURLINGAME, Calif. - May 4, 2010 - VSS Monitoring, Inc. today introduced vCapacity™, a high-performance real-time microburst measurement capability for its Distributed Traffic Capture Systems™ that provides sub-millisecond visibility into network performance. With the introduction of vCapacity, VSS becomes the only traffic capture vendor providing both real-time packet-level visibility as well as bit-level metadata for monitoring and security tools.

       vCapacity works by sampling one or multiple network links at millisecond intervals at speeds up to 10 GigE and recording link utilization on a millisecond timescale. Unlike any other approach, vCapacity measures traffic at the bit level and at full line rate, independent of switch SPAN ports, traditional taps and high-speed capture cards. This low-level view allows granular utilization data to be gathered in real time and made available to latency and high-performance network analyzers, without requiring separate taps and/or capture cards.

       vCapacity pinpoints transient and hard-to-measure problem spots the instant they occur, a necessary step in providing complete visibility into networks for analytic and security tools. vCapacity can be used to detect the presence and location of microbursts (traffic spikes that can disrupt application performance), achieve lower latency, and provide historical data for accurate network utilization reviews and planning.

       "vCapacity provides network visibility at timescales that are essential for peak operational efficiency and strategic planning," said VSS Monitoring CEO Terence Breslin. "Most network monitoring tools measure over seconds or longer, unable to identify conditions that may contribute to latency. The ones that do rely on expensive capture cards and probes which are deployed incrementally throughout a network, a stovepiped approach which is not cost scalable. vCapacity provides a highly-scalable way to measure bit-level link utilization, which is essential to identifying microbursts and other performance issues."

       vCapacity records per-millisecond quanta, timestamps them at one-second intervals, and stores them for one-minute periods for retrieval by a network analyzer or other tool. Each one-second record includes an average utilization as well as the minimum and maximum millisecond quanta for that second. The timestamp can be used to correlate port data in order to detect unrecorded seconds and to discard unwanted seconds.

       vCapacity complements other VSS Monitoring features such as user customizable filtering, ingress port timestamping, vSlice™ conditional packet slicing, and session-aware load balancing, all of which help ensure that each monitoring or security tool receives only the network traffic-whether location, type, and/or content-it needs to see.  

       vCapacity is available immediately as an option in select models of VSS Monitoring's range of Distributed Taps. For more information visit www.vssmonitoring.com/customers/vcapacity.asp.

       VSS Monitoring, Inc. Is the leader in network traffic capture, with the world's largest and most feature-rich family of traffic capture devices allowing IT professionals to see into the farthest reaches of even the largest networks, preventing problems from reaching end users, and greatly reducing the time to achieve a return on investment for network monitoring and security tools. VSS's innovative Distributed Traffic Capture Systems herald a new architecture of network monitoring, one which fundamentally improves its capability and price-performance. The company is headquartered in Burlingame, Calif.

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VSS, Distributed Traffic Capture System, vCapacity, and vSlice  are trademarks or registered trademarks of VSS Monitoring, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Any other trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.

News Media Contact:

Mark McHarry
VSS Monitoring Media Relations
Office: +1 650-697-8770
mcharry.m@vssmonitoring.com