Endace has announced the launch of the EndaceAccess 100, a brand new 100 Gigabit Ethernet (100G) capable Network Visibility Headend.

With this system, organisations can get the network access that they need to monitor, analyse, protect and troubleshoot 100G network segments. Up until this point, 100G networks have been invisible to IT operations teams.

“Until today, there had been no way for organisations to get visibility into 100G network segments, which has slowed 100G adoption,” says Endace product management and marketing senior vice president Spencer Greene.

“The EndaceAccess 100 enables organisations to leverage their existing 10Gbps capable tools in a 100G environment. Previously, when the world moved from 1Gbps to 10Gbps networking, the ability to leverage existing tools in this way proved to be a major advantage for organisations, and we expect this to be the case as organisations make the natural transition from 10Gbps to 40G and 100G networking.”

The EndaceAccess 100 is a 100G and 40G capable headend system that leverages Endace’s world-famous 100% accurate DAG technology.

The system can be configured to support LAN or WAN protocols, making it practical for deployment in both the data center and WAN environments. EndaceAccess is powerful because it enables organizations to continue to use their existing 10Gbps monitoring and security tools, which helps ease the transition from 10Gbps to 100G.

“100G is growing in adoption, but remains the domain of large enterprises and carrier core networks; it will ultimately become approachable for smaller companies within data centre deployments. As of today, there is no practical way for organisations seeking to deploy 100G to gain access to the network traffic for the purposes of network and/or network security monitoring,” says Gartner research director Jonah Kowall.

“Additionally, the monitoring tools themselves cannot handle this level of traffic which is a critical shortcoming that will prevent the deployment of 100G technology within many organisations.”

Like traditional monitoring switches, the EndaceAccess 100 headend receives high-speed network traffic from passive optical taps and distributes the traffic to multiple lower-speed ports, which can then be connected to scale-out clusters of monitoring tools. Unlike existing monitoring switches that receive10 Gbps and distribute to multiple 1Gbps or 10Gbps capable destinations, the EndaceAccess 100 scales everything up by a factor of ten, receiving 100G or 40G inputs and distributing to multiple 10Gbps destinations where the traffic can be analysed.

The system provides support for two 100G or 40G monitoring ports, that are configured to capture traffic from both sides of a bidirectional link, in two rack-units. Traffic from each monitoring port is distributed in a flow-safe way across 12 ports of 10Gbps, enabling the system to scale to support full line-rate 100G. The load-balancing algorithm used in EndaceAccess 100 enables captured traffic to be directed to specific egress ports by flow and guarantees 100% accuracy at 100G.