NP-3000 NetSensory Appliance aids software rollouts

Network Physics' network application monitor promises more information to improve software performance and make it easier to deploy applications such as Vista

Network Physics’ new NP-3000 NetSensory Appliance, launched today, is designed to help firms improve the performance of applications on the network.

The NP-3000 appliance runs an upgraded firmware package, NetSensory 5.3, offering real-time information on service-level performance and deeper insight into performance of undefined applications.

The firmware was specifically upgraded to support the new appliance, which collects traffic up to a sustained rate of 850MB/s, said Network Physics, marketing vice-president, Scott Safe. “We capture performance, utilisation, BGP peering information, packet capture and a number of other data sources helpful for firms to identify application and network problems with respect to their infrastructures.”

The NP-3000 is a 2U appliance based on Intel commodity hardware. It records highly granular data at one-minute intervals, typically allowing up to two to four weeks of information to be stored in a MySQL database. Network Physics has added Raid 10 to the four-drive disk storage and there are two copper and two fibre gigabit ports. Data comes into these ports through “spanned” switches and routers.

Network Physics is also developing NetSensory version 6.0, which is due to be demonstrated at IP06 in London in mid-October. Safe said version 6.0 could help with rollouts of Windows Vista desktops, “because if you establish a baseline of what your Windows traffic is today, then as you migrate to Windows Vista, the network protocol changes you will see should allow you to see where the bottlenecks are and allow a faster rollout. Microsoft has made it clear that there will be significant changes in this regard."

The Network Physics NP-3000 appliance running NetSensory 5.3 is available now priced from $20,000 (£10,700) for the Pro version and going up to $40,000 (£21,400) for the enterprise version.