10G is not a new word which stands for a network type carrying 10 times of Gigabits traffic in each second, it can be 10 Gigabits Ethernet or OC192 POS link. A few customers already implemented 10G at their backbone and the price per port for 10G is going to be affordable.
The high volume of network traffic means many packets. On 10G, one direction may have up to 15 million packets in each second. Most x86 based systems are not ready for processing over 10 million data pieces in a single second. So to provide an analysis solution, the 10G means nightmare to most packet analysis vendors.
The Packet analyzing companies are now fighting with the challenge. The solution are mainly for 10Gigabits Ethernet.
NetScout released a 10GE probe around 1 or 2 years ago which bases on their Gigabits probe platform. The 10GE probe can process around 1 million packets per second which means around 5G ~ 8G bits traffic can be handled well in a real network condition with larger average packets size. However, if dealing with some small packets like syn flood, the NetScout probe can only work well till 1 Gigabits level.
Network General previously launched a 10GE portable analyzer, the product was almost just for show without enough real customer cases. BTW, Network General developed many “just for show” products such as a Sniffer Wireless for PDA and a web performance management product in the year of 2000.
A japanese vendor called ClearSight offers a 10 Giga capture box which can be called first real design-for-10G packet analysis product. The 10G analyzer is designed to capture packets in line rate and featured mainly offline analysis facilities. By applying to Forensics purpose, the product maybe useful; however, lacking of the realtime expert systems and protocol inspection features, the product cannot support real traffic analysis in 10G condition very well.
After that, Network Instruments and WildPackets tap into 10GE area by their own ways as well. Both Network Instruments and WildPackets are software only vendors in around 7 years ago. They began to be more hardware/appliance vendors after the revenue paused to increase fast by providing software only solution. Network Instruments directly runs into traffic storage market with Gigastor product line which is successful. The OEM partnership between NetQoS and Network Instruments strengthen the market share of the Gigastor products.
WildPackets focused into Wireless in the beginning, the wireless analysis product bring them good revenue stream and reputation. However, the wireless analysis market grows slow. So now WildPackets emphasize the traffic storage and analysis solution with several important releases on a product line called Omnipliance.
Both Network Instruments and WildPackets had the strength in analysis with many decodes and expert systems as Network General. So the performance of their systems are not very good. Their products can provide a good realtime view into 10GE environment, however, they are not able to delivery good user experience on the 10G as well as they have done good on the lower bandwidth networks.
Till today, there is no perfect packet analysis solution for 10G, the coming WildPackets SuperCore maybe worth to see the actual performance. However, limited by the computer bus speed and analysis complexity, the analysis software plus a high-end server still cannot indicate a great future of 10G packet analysis.
There are a few FPGA/ASIC players entered this market as well, Endace, a New Zealand based company, provides 10G capture network card to offload the x86 cpu computing
pressure. GigaMon provides a solution base on one-to-many distribution purpose to share the analysis work on multiple machines. Napatech, who was Xyratex, 
recently announced a 20G pattern match card beside their famous multiple port giga/10G analysis cards.
Eventually, the 10G analysis will come to reality and be common, let’s wait and see how long it’s gonna happen.
