Napatech cards are used as the capture cards for VMX-Capture. They provide:

  • Deep buffers, to provide highest fidelity capture.

  • The ability to take in PTP and/or PPS time signals (if required - Beeks Analytics can also decode packet aggregator timestamps).

  • The ability to separate traffic into distinct streams at the Napatech FPGA layer - this has the benefit of offloading this task from the server CPU, providing greater scalability and ability to balance traffic between PMUXs.

The ability to balance traffic between streams is a key element of the open scaling foundational principle of the Beeks Analytics architecture.

One or more Napatech cards are mandatory for any deployment of VMX-Capture that captures packet data from the wire or replays packet data to the wire.

The Napatech NT200A02 card is the recommended standard capture card for VMX-Capture appliances.

  • The NT200A02 capture card can accept many different port speeds:

    • 2×1/10G

    • 8×10G (with breakout cables)

    • 2×10/25G (direct cabling)

    • 4×10/25G (with breakout cables)

    • 2×40G

    • 2×100G

  • Note that both ports on a single card must support the same configured speed.

  • Breakout cables will be supplied if any of the 4 or 8 port connections are needed. The length of the cables will need to be specified- the options are 1 metre, 3 metre or 5 metres.

  • Beeks will provide the optics for the Beeks Analytics appliance. We will need to know whether the interfaces are long-range (LR i.e. single-mode) or short-range (SR i.e. multi-mode) fibre connections.