Beeks Analytics appliances use FPGA-based expansion cards to support high-speed, lossless capture and compression across diverse financial traffic conditions. They also support the precise timed replay functionality used by mdPlay.
These cards are configured for use as part of the VMX-Capture configuration.
There are two types of FPGA card used in VMX-Capture:
Capture cards – Required for all live packet capture and replay scenarios
Compression cards – Used to compress packet data before it’s written to disk, improving throughput. Only applicable to live packet capture, and not mandatory.
Name | Type | Size | Capability |
|---|---|---|---|
Bittware Agilex IA-440I | Compression | FH | 55Gbit/s |
Napatech NT50A01 | Capture | LP | 2x1G/10G/25G SFP+ |
Napatech NT200A02 | Capture | FH | 2xQSFP28 and 1xRJ45 1G PTP 2x1G, 10G, 25G, 40G, 100G 4x25G with breakouts 8x10G with breakouts |
Dell PERC H840 | External RAID | LP | 2x SAS Only needed when the additional external disks are required (Storage Variant E2L) |
Capture cards
One or more Napatech capture cards are required for all VMX-Capture deployments where packet capture or packet replay are required.
The NT200A02 is the preferred card for most Beeks Analytics installations. It supports:
Hardware timestamping via PTP or PPS input
2× QSFP28 ports, supporting multiple speeds and breakout configurations - see Appendix: Napatech NT200A02 Capture Card Connectivity for details.
Alternative: NT50A01 (Compact Card)
The NT50A01 is a low-profile, lower-cost alternative that supports:
2× SFP+ ports (1G/10G/25G)
Software timestamping only — it synchronises to the host system clock
While not suitable for sub-millisecond latency correlation or tick-to-order analysis on its own, the NT50A01 is well-suited for:
Microburst detection
Traffic classification
Deployments where timestamping is handled by upstream equipment, such as a timestamping tap aggregator/packet broker.
When used with a packet aggregator that inserts its own timestamps, the VMX-Capture stack will be configured to use these in preference to the less reliable timestamps applied by the NT50A01 card.
Without external timestamping, the card syncs to the host clock; this typically achieves sub-second absolute accuracy, which is generally sufficient for burst analysis and traffic shaping diagnostics.
The Beeks Analytics Deployment Options document contains advice around the different ways of mirroring packets to Beeks Analytics, including an overview of packet broker timestamping features.
Our standard deployment features a single Napatech card, but for more connectivity-rich environments our 2U chassis types can support up to 3 x NT200A02 cards within the same chassis. The NT200A02 cards support either PTP or PPS inputs for the hardware time synchronisation.
Compression cards
One or more compression cards are an optional part of any VMX-Capture deployment. They compress data on-the-fly before it is written to disk. This allows VMX-Capture to deal effectively with higher data volumes than would be possible without compression.
Different financial market protocols have different compression characteristics, and for low volume deployments it is possible to deploy VMX-Capture without a compression card.
The compression cards also move packet capture decompression tasks onto the FPGA, which speeds up these tasks and reduces the load on the server CPU.
The currently supported card is the Bitware Agilex IA-440i.
Multiple compression cards are supported in an appliance and scale linearly. Typically a combined capture + analysis appliance would have a single compression card for all but the largest all-in-one appliances. Where we implement a dedicated 2U capture box, we would typically recommend a minimum of 2 compression cards.
See the notes in the Beeks Analytics Performance Guide about compression cards to gauge which use cases are suited to compression cards and how the compression cards can be scaled.