Teledyne LeCroy Announces Flexible Storage and Network Test Solutions for 8/16G Fibre Channel and 10/40G Ethernet

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 not only the most advanced protocol analyzer solutions available, but are also the lowest cost Fibre Channel and Ethernet protocol analyzer systems in the market today.

With these introductions, Teledyne LeCroy has significantly 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, Vice President of 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.
Lowest Cost Fibre Channel & Ethernet Analysis Solutions on the Market

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, highly compact, extremely flexible, multi-function protocol analyzers. Utilizing FlexPort, each port-pair can probe both Ethernet and Fibre Channel links up to speeds of 16G on copper or optical cabling.
New SierraNet M168 and Enhanced SierraNet M408 Capabilities

In addition to the cost benefits and many technical enhancements detailed above, Teledyne LeCroy has introduced several other important innovations to the SierraNet platforms including:

-Integrated 40Gbps Ports: The SierraNet M408 is the only analyzer in the market with two integrated 40Gbps QSFP ports. By integrating the QSFP ports in the hardware, the SierraNet M408 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, Portable and Light Weight: The SierraNet platforms are the Smallest (1U) and lightest (9.5lbs) Fibre Channel and Ethernet protocol analyzer platforms in the market, saving valuable real estate in customer labs and racks and offering the best portable solution for engineers on the move.

-Fast and Convenient Access to Data:

-USB3.0 Host Interface: The SierraNet M168 and M408 provide the fastest upload speeds in the market delivering more than a 5x transfer rate improvement over any other Fibre Channel or Ethernet Analyzer. This is particularly 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.

-Best 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 SierraNet 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.

-Largest and Most Flexible Recording Memory: The SierraNet 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.

-New and Improved Graphical User Interface (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 already shipping and the SierraNet M168 starts shipping in July, 2013.