The flagship offering from Solera Networks is their DS Series of appliances, which specialize in the capture of traffic from gigabit networks to both included and external disk-based storage arrays. This captured traffic can be made available in several ways to 3rd party traffic analysis products and tools; thus the primary use of the product is the gathering of traffic for the use of 3rd party network forensics applications such as performance optimization or security analysis. According to the vendor, hundreds of 3rd party analysis and reporting tools are supported, including EtherPeek, Wireshark, Snort, and more.

The appliances are split into two types of boxes: The DS Series appliances themselves, which perform the actual work of capturing packet data; and the DS Storage appliance, an add-on box that provides additional, external storage space to DS 3150/5150 appliances.

The capture appliances attach to the network via the SPAN port of a switch, a TAP, or an optical splitter. Each of the appliances (available in 1U to 3U sizes) contains included storage for the captured traffic; the 3U DS 5150, for example, includes 16 TB of storage. The high end appliances (the 3150 and 5150) additionally support connectivity to the vendor's 24 TB DS Storage appliance (up to 48 of which can be clustered, for a total capacity of up to 576 TB), or connectivity to existing FC or iSCSI SAN storage. Capture performance is listed from 1 Gb/sec in the CALEA Appliance, to 10 Gb/sec in the DS 5150.

Appliance features include support for the filtering of ingress or egress traffic (supported filters include time stamp, protocol, MAC address, IP address, payload contents, or "... any other bit of information within the packet," all of which are applied to packets individually); and support for traffic regeneration (playback) including buffering and throttling controls. Software tools included for use with the appliances include traffic analysis and visibility tools; a "Virtual Tap," which allows for the capturing of network traffic between virtual machines in the same physical machine; SOAP and REST APIs for integration of the appliances with 3rd party platforms; and the vendor's Web-based Control Center, providing a management interface for the definition and implementation of filters, starting and stopping of captures, network replay/regeneration, download of PCAP files, etc.

Solera offers their technology primarily in the form of the DS Series appliances; but notes that software only sales may be considered depending on the size of the customer's order.

Four primary flavors of the capture appliance are currently offered; ranging from the 1U CALEA Appliance (featuring 1 Gb/sec capture speeds and targeted primarily to ISPs and VoIP providers for CALEA compliance), to the 3U 5150 with 16 TB of internal storage, two 10 Gb/sec fiber ports, the user's choice of four 1 Gig copper or 1 Gig fiber ports, and 16 GB of system memory. The CALEA Appliance is also available as a Virtual Appliance download.

New to the vendor's product offerings is the availability of their capture technology to OEMs (dubbed Solera Networks Capture Stack); enabling manufacturer/vendors to integrate the technology in their own products.

The DS Series appliances are available now; pricing starts at $10,000. Visit the vendor's Web site for further information.