Network Instruments

Network Instruments develops software and hardware solutions for analyzing and managing network and application performance, such as network analyzers. They were founded in 1994, and are headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota.[1]

The mainstay product of Network Instruments is its Observer family of network analyzers (including Observer, Observer Expert and Observer Suite). The Observer product family was built for real-time analysis, monitoring, and reporting of full-duplex network links in environments including local area networks (LAN), wireless, Fibre Channel, Wide Area Networks, gigabit Ethernet, and Full duplex 10 GbE and 40 GbE.

Network Instruments was the first company that achieved sustained full duplex 10 GBit capture of all network traffic to disk ( 20 GBit/s or over 2.6 Giga Bytes per second on GigaStor 192 TeraByte drive array). As of this writing, no other company achieved much more than half of this benchmark. The systems known to maintain this level of performance up to 1.25 PetaBytes of storage, which automatically increases to 2.5 PetaBytes with 8TB hard drives, and 5 PetaBytes as hard drives will move into 16TB size range.

Network Instruments 1 gigabit Ethernet, 10 gigabit Ethernet, 40 gigabit Ethernet, Sonet and Fibre Channel hardware includes full-duplex multi-link capture cards that are designed and manufactured by Network Instruments. Designed for full-duplex analysis, they performs deep packet analysis, filtering and other processing on the card.

Network Instruments also designs retrospective network analysis products, such as their GigaStor appliance, which records packets traversing the network for prolonged periods of time, for later use in network analysis, trending, and security forensics.

Network Instruments Observer Infrastructure is an active network infrastructure discovery, mapping, reporting and management platform. It, like all other Observer family products, can provide data to Observer Reporting Server for enterprise wide reporting on device and infrastructure health, loads, availability, performance, trending and baselining. OI leverages SNMP, WMI (Windows Management Infrastructure), WSD (web service XML/SOAP data), HTTP, SSH, JMX (Java Management Extensions), and proprietary protocols to obtain performance metrics for a wide range of devices, services, and applications. Observer Infrastructure polls and tracks availability and performance of IP services, all routers, switches, Windows, Mac and Unix systems and servers, Citrix Xen, Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware ESX servers, Parallels Virtuozzo Containers, Riverbed, HP WAN optimization products, Cisco WAAS devices, DB2, Informix, MySQL, Oracle, SQL, Sybase ASE, and many more devices are added or can be added via flexible monitor scripts.

Network Instruments products are built on a Unified Code Set known as NI-DNA (Distributed Network Architecture).[2]

Network Instruments has been acquired by JDSU in January, 2014. It is now a division of JDSU.

References

  1. ↑ "About Us". Network Instruments.
  2. ↑ Distributed Network Architecture "NI-DNA™: Network Instruments Distributed Network Architecture". Network Instruments.

External links