ONPATH Technologies announced that they have expanded their partnership with Simena, the innovative leader in network monitoring and testing solutions, to bring to market a new, high-density packet flow switch, the PFS1764. ONPATH will include the new PFS1764, along with the existing PFS1524, as part of their Universal Connectivity System (UCS) portfolio of products.

The PFS1764 is a new monitoring switch that offers the industry's highest port density and lowest latency available in the market. With up to 64 ports of any combination of 1 or 10Gbps traffic, and up to 4 ports of 40Gbps traffic available in a single rack unit, the PFS1764 offers both high-speed packet switching and wire-speed packet processing in the same platform. ONPATH's UCS portfolio integrates with that platform to cost-effectively enable customers to scale the PFS1764's functionality to hundreds, or even thousands, of ports of connectivity. The PFS1764 also offers an open Linux control plane enabling customers to develop high-speed custom packet processing applications, and run them directly on the PFS1764.

The PFS1764 offers the industry's lowest port-to-port latency for an L2-4 monitoring switch, based on the cut-through architecture. All ports can be used in any combination, for connectivity or to perform such functions as aggregating, filtering, disseminating, or load-balancing network traffic to a variety of devices, including monitoring, measurement, and security tools. This enables customers to optimize the performance and investment in these expensive tools. It also allows network managers to reduce cost by centralizing operations, monitoring services, and enhancing network security. The PFS 1764 offers such advanced features as:

Industry's lowest latency at 300nsec

Wire-speed 1GE, 10GE, and 40GE ports across Layers 2-4

Scalable up to 64 ports of 1/10G and 4ports of 40G per 1RU

Packet slicing to forward only the required portion of packets

MPLS and VLAN flexibility to tag, stack, replace, or rename any port

Load balance traffic to multiple monitoring tools

Internal TAP and multicast critical traffic to multiple security devices

Aggregate several traffic streams to a single network tool

Time stamping with 1PPS, NTP, and IEEE 1588/PTPv2 standards support

Multi-core control processor to support deep packet inspection, packet de-duplication, and microburst detection

HTTP, HTTPS, SSH, Telnet, CLI, API, RS232D, USB, TACACS+ management options

Web-based GUI for clustering and central management

Extensive alerting via remote Syslog, SNMP traps, LiveLog, SMTP, TACACS+

Scaling up to hundreds and thousands of ports when used with the ONPATH's UCS 3900

The PFS1764 enables users to run all of these advanced features at full wire speed, without impacting performance, to provide unprecedented flexibility and complete control in forwarding packets with an unlimited number of connectivity options.

Combined, the new PFS1764 and ONPATH's UCS 3900 series of highly flexible, scalable, and high density physical layer switching, deliver the industry's most complete Layer 1 through 4 connectivity and monitoring solution across enterprise and Federal applications. With speed- and protocol-independent connectivity ranging from RS-232 to 100Gbps and beyond, including standard protocols like Ethernet, Fiber Channel, and SONET, as well as proprietary protocols, the ONPATH solution provides monitoring of performance and security applications across virtually any network infrastructure. ONPATH enables customers to increase their overall network security, reliability, and performance; increase the utilization and network uptime, of existing data center, monitoring, and security tools; monitor more with less budget and personnel; simplify the operation of their network; manage change more quickly; reduce mean time to repair; and adhere to compliance mandates.

"Combing the high speed packet switching and processing capabilities of the PFS1764, with the reliability and scalability of our UCS 3900 platform, together ONPATH and Simena offer customers the world's most scalable and cost-effective connectivity and monitoring solution," said Brian McCann, CEO of ONPATH. "The result enables network managers to conserve time, increase the utilization of their network, and significantly save money."

"The PFS1764 delivers a new concept in monitoring networks: high-speed packet switching and wire-speed packet processing in the same platform," said Sezen Uysal, President of Simena. "Partnering with ONPATH not only delivers added Layer 1 functionality, but also enables the ability to cost-effectively scale the solution to thousands of ports of connectivity."