Teledyne LeCroy With Storage and Network Test Solutions

Teledyne LeCroy SARL, in protocol test solutions, announced the addition of the SierraNet M168 and its new FlexPort Technology to the SierraNet product family.

        SierraNet M168

The SierraNet M168 is an 8-port multi-protocol analyzer and error injector supporting up to 16G FC and 10GbE protocols. Teledyne LeCroy also announced the addition of FlexPort and 40Gbps Ethernet analysis and error injection capabilities to the SierraNet M408.

Starting at $19,950, the SierraNet M168 and M408 are advanced protocol analyzer solutions and low cost FC and Ethernet protocol analyzer systems.

"With these introductions, Teledyne LeCroy has expanded its commitment to the SAN market and is now the only protocol analysis company to support every bus, at every speed, for every protocol in the SAN," said Joe Mendolia, VP marketing for Teledyne LeCroy’s protocol solutions group. "In extending that commitment, Teledyne LeCroy’s Engineering teams also created CrossSync, which provides the ability to fully time-correlate all protocol traffic across the SAN including FC, FCoE, iSCSI, NVMe, PCIe, SAS, SATA, SATA-Express, and SCSI-Express."

Low Cost FC and Ethernet Analysis Solutions
By leveraging FlexPort in its SierraNet family of products, Teledyne LeCroy has been able to eliminate the need for costly single-function blades, pods and adapters found in some competitive products. In addition to minimizing cost, FlexPort also allows for the creation of portable, compact, flexible, multi-function protocol analyzers. Utilizing FlexPort, each port-pair can probe both Ethernet and FC links up to speeds of 16G on copper or optical cabling.

SierraNet M168 and Enhanced M408 Capabilities
Teledyne LeCroy has introduced several other innovations to the SierraNet platforms including:

Integrated 40Gbps Ports
The SierraNet M408 is with two integrated 40Gbps QSFP ports. By integrating the QSFP ports in the hardware, it eliminates the complexity of external ‘octopus’ cables used in competitive products. This also ensures reliable analysis by eliminating the risk associated with the additional 8 potential failure points the ‘octopus’ cables create in a test environment.

Compact
The SierraNet platforms are small (1U) and light (9.5lbs) FC and Ethernet protocol analyzer platforms, saving real estate in customer labs and racks and offering a portable solution for engineers on the move.

Fast and Convenient Access to Data

• USB 3.0 Host Interface: The SierraNet M168 and M408 provide fast upload speeds, delivering more than a 5x transfer rate improvement over any other FC or Ethernet Analyzer. This is important when capturing large amounts of data or when a quick connection to the analyzer is required ensuring more of the user’s time is spent testing and less time spent waiting for the analyzer to save trace files to the host system.
• GIGE Host Interface: For added convenience, IP Address set-up menus are available on the front panel of the SierraNet eliminating the time and complexity required to configure an analyzer via a null-modem cable and hyper-terminal interface.

Time-Stamp Resolution
The SierraNet family has been enhanced with a 1ns time-stamp resolution/accuracy setting a new industry standard for trace analysis and for timing measurements required for testing high performance SAN products.

Advanced State Machines
The family includes advanced and easy to use Triggers, Filters and Error Injection capabilities with up to 4 sequencers and up to 24 states per sequencer, providing surgical precision to concisely target areas of interest and save precious time.

Large and Flexible Recording Memory
The family provides for the largest capture capabilities in the market (up to 64GB) and extends this lead even further with dynamic memory allocation. SierraNet products can dynamically assign up to 50% (or up to 32GB) of the total recording memory to one port-pair or spread the memory use across all eight ports dynamically based on the traffic profile. This is necessary when the user can not accurately define the conditions associated with a problem and needs to capture a broad swath of traffic to identify the issue.

Improved GUI
To match the performance and capabilities of the SierraNet family, Teledyne LeCroy has engineered the new Net Protocol Suite application, an easy to use and unified software architecture for all functions. In addition to industry standard views like Spreadsheet and Frame Inspector, the Net Protocol Suite has several user-focused enhancements such as trace reassembly of fragmented protocol data (for IP related traffic) and contextual ‘zero-time’ searching and filtering. In comparison, competitive trace views and search capabilities display irrelevant and/or unrelated information along with relevant information leaving the user to guess which items to review.

The SierraNet M408 is shipping and the SierraNet M168 starts shipping in July, 2013.