The Beeks Analytics appliance is a term that we use to refer to the environment within which the Beeks Analytics software components run.

At its simplest to understand, the appliance is the physical hardware that Beeks supplies which runs the Beeks Analytics components.

However, as part of its open architecture, Beeks Analytics is also available as a software-only option. Clients can provide their own hardware, using specifications provided by Beeks.

You can think of the appliance as the wrapper around your Beeks Analytics deployment. Regardless of whether you are running just VMX-Capture, just VMX-Analysis, or all components together, the appliance scripts and directory structure provide a consistent service management interface and application framework. The appliance includes the operating system deployment.

It is also possible to also run VMX-Capture software outside of an appliance deployment (i.e. against a standard Linux x86 operating system, e.g. deployed in the cloud). Speak to your Beeks contacts if you have a particular use case in mind.

A Beeks Analytics appliance which is designed for packet capture will have one or more FPGA cards which deliver high performance capture and compression:

• A Capture Card provides buffering, timestamping, and traffic separation features

• An optional Compression Card provides compression (when writing captures to disk) and decompression (when reading packet captures)

The above FPGA cards are not necessary where VMX-Capture is running against your own packet captures (i.e. it is not performing the capture functionality).