Why an Appliance?

Controlling the hardware and OS allowed us to deal with several performance-critical issues:

• need to not to drop packets
• disk space and disk I/O
• security of the monitoring machine
  • reasonably securable system
  • single-purpose machine
  • silence on the monitored wire

The box shown on the last screen contains 80 gig of capture disk, and can stand up to about 7Mbit/sec continuous data rate. We've built boxes with up to 1 terabyte of storage; we're working on OC3 data rate.

This box costs about $15k.